WHISPERINGS 
OF THE SPHINX 




WILLIAM L£l GHTOK 




Class _^^S?-JiM. 



Book .L5C4- 
GopyrightM" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHISPERINGS OF THE 
SPHINX 



WHISPERINGS OF THE 
SPHINX 



BY 

WILLIAM LEIGHTON 

Author of "The History of Oliver and Arthur," " The Sons 
OF Godwin," "At the Court of King Edwin," etc. 




CHICAGO 

R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 

1906 






\^ 







UeRAR¥ofCONSRESS{ 
Two Cosies Received 

APR 4 1907 

Copyright Entry 

CLii^. I, /^o7 

CLASS cu XXc, No, 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1906 

BY 

WILLIAM LEIGHTON 



C!)f ILafetgttJe ^regg 

B. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 
CHICAGO 



w 

"^ 









TO MY SON 



(UnnttntB 







Page 


I 


Change 


9 


II 


Time 


. . '15 


III 


Memory 


22 


IV 


Transfigurations 


28 


V 


Mother-Earth 


37 


VI 


Ocean 


43 


VII 


War 


. " 47 


VIII 


Mutation of Races 


50 


IX 


Fall of Empires 


59 


X 


Progress . 


. 65 


XI 


Man . 


. . . 72 


XII 


Force 


75 


XIII 


Identity . 


80 


XIV 


The Blind Goddess 


82 


XV 


Life's Romance and 


Reality . 85 


XVI 


The Psyche's Intuit] 


[ONS . . 90 


XVII 


Psyche's Search 


95 


XVIII 


Psyche Looks Beyon] 


D . . lOI 


XIX 


Psyche's Inspiration 


s . . 106 


XX 


Psyche's Flight 


113 



W^xBptrmsB 0f % Bplfmx 



"What is it walks at morn on four feet, two 

At noon, and three at night? " In desert sand 
Sat the wise Sphinx, and in that Theban land 
Asked her enigma; and we ask anew, 
What is this creature ? (Edipus, 'tis true, 

Answered: ''The thing is man." We under- 
stand 
He guessed the name, but not the meaning 
grand. 
Within the deep enigma, hid from view. 

The Theban Sphinx was pondering: "What is 
man ? " 
As we must ponder in this later age : 
Is he but highest type of earthly things. 
Or the angelic heir of Nature's plan ? 
And his Earth-travel, a short pilgrimage 
That, toward a Heavenly life, his journey brings ? 

What does it mean, this dizzy whirl of things 
That we call life ? If Science speak, alas. 
Her voice is drowned in louder sounds that pass 

Her colder tones, the violent outcry ings 

Of turbulent emotions! Nature sings 
In chords and discords whose confusing mass 
Deafens our ears; and yet the flowers, trees, grass. 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Oceans, hills, forests — all have vocal strings 
Tuned to man's every mood, thought's every 
theme. 
All forms of animal life on earth, in sea, 
In air — infinity of creatures — all 

Are breeding, living, dying, in a scheme 

Where each hath time and place. And why 
are we 
Actors and viewers of this carnival ? 

Life's problems — how they press upon the mind! 
How numberless I how vast! how intricate! — 
The simplest fortune and the humblest fate 
Some form of answering thought must seek to 

find. 
No brain so sluggish, and no soul so blind. 

Not to have felt life's movements — love, pride, 

hate. 
Longings, emotions, passions; each hath weight 
Which all must feel and strive to measure. Kind 
Or harsh though fate, the spirit's deepest cell 
Hath no retreat of calm serenity 
Where we may hush our mental questionings: 
Whether we do our life-work ill or well ? 
If life endureth to eternity ? 
If good or ill lives in the soul of things ? 

If always life would move by certain ways 
It were a simple thing to draw its plan,-1 
And make a pleasant garden-path for man 

Where he could pass contented all his days; 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



But man is not content: some thought betrays 
His calm of happiness; nor ever can 
He win the peace of soul ere doubt began : 

The germ of doubt, once bom, forever stays. 
With their entangling lines of mystery, 

The wonders round him stir his interest. 
Awaking thoughts of strange perplexity 

While leading him, with still increasing zest. 
Through ways in which his bosom thrills to find 
Nature's response to sympathetic mind. 

Beyond his garden-walk kind Nature's smile 
May cheer the voyager: from her banks of 

flowers 
And roses blooming in their perfumed bowers 

Beauty will charm the wanderer in his toil 

If he return an answering smile the while : 
The forests grandly sing to him; his powers 
The restless ocean stirs; his troubled hours 

Nature hath often power to reconcile. 

The lightning gleams above him; peal on peal 

The thunder roars; the storm, the hurricane. 
Sweep over him: unharmed while mountains 
reel, 

He sees that Nature, in her stormiest reign. 
Hath often kindness in her stem commands, 
And toucheth tenderly with giant hands. 

But wherefore do I linger ? While I wait 
The all-controlling march of Change waits not; 
Nor in the universe is there one spot 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Exempt from its constraint; nor any state 
Immunity from Change can arrogate. 

It moveth mountains, seas; what man doth 

plot 
Its tyrant hand may in an instant blot; 
Empires are humbled, and their power a date; 
For age comes to them, as it comes to all, 

And hides them in the dust — ay, even now. 
While but a breathing pause I dare to call, 
I may not know if it will that allow ! 
Yet, sure of an eternal government 
Above all change, I rest in calm content. 

I sing no warrior's wrath, no deeds of arms, 
Hero, or sage; no such adventurous voyaging 
As from the shores of Thessaly set forth 
In the old mythical Past; or when from Troy 
The wisest of the Greeks came wandering, 
By Circe's isle and fair Calypso's cave. 
Back to his Ithaca; nor such sea-tossing 
As vexed ^Eneas, pious but perfidious, 
Sailing from Carthage with the funeral fires 
Of burning Dido crimsoning sky and sea. 

I may not sing th' angelic hosts of Heaven, 
Nor Eden-life, whose song rings out as sweet. 
As grand, to-day as when its glorious verse 
Filled the blind poet's lips; nor a descent 
To shadowy worlds of bliss and punishment; 
Virgil and Dante sit, with laureled brows, 
Before the gates of Hades, and their songs 
Charm back all poesy would venture there. 



Whisperings op the Sphinx 



Why do I summon thus the memories 
Of famous verse to dwarf my later thoughts, 
And cast upon my page the giant shadows 
Of epic song ? I have no marshaled hosts 
Of glittering war to wage Homeric battles, 
No gods or goddesses in cars of cloud 
To mingle loves or angers with mankind: 
Why conjure up their shapes ? 

Than these, my theme 
Hath grander scope: I summon them to set 
Beside the olden giants older Change; 
To show how in the whirl of pitiless years 
Gods, sages, heroes, poets, warriors — all 
Are trodden into dust, while Change lives on. 
As gathering strength from every ruined thing, 
And making broad and broader, year on year, 
One universal empire. 'Tis a theme 
Greater than all the epics of the past; 
But yet how poor my words can picture it: 
A giant overtopping the great heads 
Of mountains, dressed in patchwork of my verse! 

The language of the myriad tongues of life. 

The songs of all the melodies of earth. 

The crash of discords — all that makes impression 

On the receptive brain and soul of man. 

His thirst for knowledge, his aspiring reach 

To higher forms of truth, his doubts, his hopes, 

His inspirations — how the soul is stirred 

To gather these, and all in one great throb 

Of meaning; make, of every voice, one voice, 



13 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



One meaning out of many! But, alas, 
Confusion overwhelms our understandings, 
Too poor to hold together in one thought 
The infinite! Yet, while around us lie 
Limitless mysteries which w^e lack power 
To analyze and gauge, the thought remains. 
Although beyond full grasp of human mind. 
That nature, in herself, is unity; 
Her murmurs, thunders, whispers, but one voice — 
One voice in all. What is it telling us? 

How can we best interpret her great words ? 

Distinguish, in the crash of moving atoms, 

The utterance of universal truth ? — 

How can we bend attentive ears to hear 

True words of Nature's mystic whisperings, 

Which she, the oldest of the Sphinxes, breathes 

To patient listeners, who, in her great presence. 

Should still be watchful of her faintest murmurs — 

Listeners who ask her lips for revelations 

In answer to the questionings of their souls ? — 

How catch the secrets that she half reveals. 

And make the half a whole — when, all the while, 

Our unrestrainable emotions cry, 

And individual fortunes claim our thoughts 

In the particular chances and quick changes 

That fill the crowded paths of human life ? 



14 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



II 

Time! — On my mantel in a crystal case. 
With steady beat, the shining pendulum swings; 
I read the legend every instant brings, 

Written in figures on my dial's face, 

And call this Time. So go, with steady pace, 
The silent hours; so, like a Siren, sings. 
Lulling to sleep, the t)T:ant of all things. 

The hungry feaster on each age and race. 

How runs the legend? " Future, Present, Past; 
Time swallows all." There is no solid land 

Beneath my feet; no moment standeth fast: 
All — all is flight. As slips the hour-glass sand, 

So am I hurried on, while Memory wrings 

Her hands in woe : I fly on Times's broad wings. 

Dreamlike and vague. Imagination's vision 

Of Nature's birth floats over Nature's facts 

As springs the rainbow's arch above bright drops 

That build its glittering bow, — dreamlike and 

vague. 
Yet on material facts as strongly pillared 
As some vast dome is set on colonnades 
Of marble where each base hath sure foundation 
In the deep-anchored, rocky ribs of Earth — 
A vision picturing a history, 
A bright refraction from material atoms 
Touched by the sunlight of man's intellect 
Till their bright track of color glows before him. 



IS 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And builds a shining bridge to bear his thought 
Upon its arch across the chasms of Time. 
And man, whose waking dreams seem often phan- 
toms 
Of the great heart of ancient mystery 
Now opening to him, climbs th' aerial stair; 
Sets his small rule against the gleaming heavens; 
Measures their vastness; or writes confidently 
The daring visions brought by Thought and Fancy 
To toiling Mind, the annals of his world. 

His world — what is it ? — that extent abroad 

Outreaching sense can gather to his grasp. 

He sees, about him, shifting atoms group, 

And the groups cluster, aggregating mass; 

Then dreams, conceptive, how in younger time, 

In the wide region of the unconfined. 

Nebulous matter gathered up in space; 

Gases, condensing, grew to solid forms, 

Shaping by laws inherent into orbs — 

Stars, suns, earths, planets and their satellites. 

Seeking to know the origin of all, 

The key of Nature's puzzling intricacy. 

The clue upleading to a Primal Force, 

The might propelling atoms in their race 

Through the illimitable paths of stars, 

He finds philosophy of no avail; 

In Nature's elements his utmost reach; 

And the beyond — if he so far would dare — 

An unknown country, dim in hazy distance, * 

Fancy's wide realm in which Imagination 



i6 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Builds bright ideals, though each from the sug- 
gestion 
Of a reality's more sober shape. 
Looking abroad for Nature's moving powers 
He only grasps results as atoms fly; 
Finds Chaage the ruler of created things, 
The doom of every wandering molecule. 
The history of planets and of suns, 
The ripple under which there stirs a law, 
The burning car on which a meteor rides. 

As daylight to our eyes, Time, to our thoughts, 

Is a familiar; yet this daily theme. 

This common, household word, is but a symbol 

Set up to represent a larger thing 

Than limited thought hath breadth to comprehend; 

A wise device by which we strive to mark. 

With careful numbers, all the flying scenes 

That crowd successive on the narrow stage 

Of our domain, this whirling, sunlit earth; 

A measure — happy inspiration ! — made 

For the immeasurable. Ah, vain man! 

How dare he seek to grasp so great a thing ? 

He cannot hope to give the boundless bounds, 

Nor mark the margins of eternity! 

Even Imagination, though it rise 

A higher flight than Pegasus e'er soared. 

Feels weary tremors stay its bold, broad wings 

Ere yet is reached the ancient shore of Time, 

Content at last to find some distant spot 

Beyond the morning of man's memory 

Where it may set, forsooth, its outmost line, 



17 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



A measure only of conditioned reach. 
Anticipation, sweeping through the years 
Of coming time and eons yet to be, 
Hath no prophetic power, or wizard forecast, 
In the conceptive chambers of the brain, 
To tell the end of Time. 

No star of heaven 
Was shining in the dark extent of space 
When Time began, to be its natal light; 
And when Time ends, the all-unnumbered host 
Of gleaming lights that flash and glimmer forth 
Through our vast dome of sky — ay! the white 

walls 
Of heaven's great vault, the sky's star-masonry 
Roofed grandly over us — will, with ovir earth, 
Have filled their use, grown cold, and dull, and 

black, 
And died a nameless, unrecorded death. 
Time and the stars!— the ocean and a drop! — 
The sea-shore and a single grain of sand! — 
To gauge eternity by shine of stars 
Were burning candles to light up the sun! 

Days, months, years, centuries, are woven links 
Of which an endless chain is ever made; 
Our dear To-day, the last and nearest one, 
Joined to the infinite our little Now. 
One end supported by — we know not what. 
Beyond the limit where far-darting thought, 
Though plumed with fancies, fails its baffled flight. 
The chain of Time is hung, down-reaching us 
Through the mysterious vast of eons past. 



i8 



Whisperings or the Sphinx 



Out of the darkness of an ancient night 
Hang pendant ages lost in ebon depths 
As they recede; but, on the latest link, 
Catching the dazzling sunlight of the Present; — 
One point of two abstruse infinitudes, 
One light thus glimmering in immensity. 
That walls it round about, and hangs above, 
Waiting the flaming spark to pale and die; — 
While clustering round that light, its fleeting day, 
And bathing fragile lives in its sweet beams, 
And dreaming this To-day, the one dear thing 
For which primeval darkness was pushed back. 
And Time's long chain thus kindly forged and 

hung, 
Is man's weak race that labors, laughs, and weeps, 
Or, stirred by busy fancies, builds a stair 
Of fine imagination's gossamer 
Far up the chain on which its day depends. 
So, round a candle, flits an insect brood. 
Blind, in its flickering glare, to all beside, 
Oft scorching thin-spun wings in touch of flame, 
But yet returning to the dazzling peril, 
Happy to spend a life of briefest span 
Buzzing about a smoking luminary. 
The only refuge from surrounding night. 

Time, thou art clothed with mystery's strange 
awe! 
From cloudy gates in mythic fable hid 
Thou hast come forth; before thee broadly stretch 
Interminable galleries, through which 



19 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Thy armies march! We hear the noisy din, 
The shouts and trampling of life's multitudes, 
With which our voices mingle and are lost. 
We look behind and see the scattered wrecks 
Of age on age along the ruined Past 
Until the lines of far perspective touch. 
And all beyond is merged in misty points. 
The periods of our knowledge — in advance, 
And a great wall of darkness, densely black, 
Moves as we move, but hides the forward country. 
To which we go, from our impatient eyes — 
Around, and the quick hurry of the march 
Is seen on all: one sings rejoicing songs. 
Another weeps; but all, with even step, 
Keep pace to the great march; or, failing so. 
Are left dead wrecks upon the track of years — 
Dead wrecks on which, with back-turned eyes, 

we look 
Awhile regretful; but the jostle soon. 
And distance, break our fervent sorrowing 
As the fierce hurry of the noisy Present 
Drowns, with its clamor, low-voiced Memory. 

From dreamless slumber in the silent land 
Of embryos come forth the new, swift years 
Laden with destinies of worlds and men, 
Throw down their burdens in the flying Present, 
Then leap into the Past. Soft twilight tints 
Cast lingering lustre roimd each flitting form. 
But darken soon into a normal night 
As close the black, funereal curtains round 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



A perished age — save where, faint glimmering 
Like an uncertain starlight, Memory's rays 
Glance twinkling down amid the night of years ; 
But pierce not deepest shadows that lie thick 
On far-off eras, like the black of pines 
In a night landscape, hiding all beyond. 
While nearer, half revealed in fitful light. 
The valley lies, and sheen of winding stream 
Like silver ribbon shining from its fringe 
Of birchen clumps, o'er which the starlight flings 
Mysterious charms of fairy witchery. 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



III 

How shall I paint thy presence, Memory ? 

Unto my thought thou art a stately queen; 

Upon thy broad, fair brow, a look serene 
Of calm and intellectual majesty; 
Within thy eyes a world of history ; 

Compassion, kindness mingle in thy mien; 

Through all a high divinity is seen, 
And presence grand of native royalty. 

Over thy face, expression's quickening play 
Seems struggling with weird lines of mystery, 

But often flashes, like a sunbeam's ray, 
Dissolving doubts and fears in certainty. 

Kindling the torch whose light will show the 
way 
Through untried paths to new discovery. 

O Memory, let me not, with too faint praise. 
Slander the greatness of thy ministry! 
Without thee, man had been as poor a thing 
As the blind worm, his type of feebleness. 
Thou art the soul's awaking element. 
The germ of intellect from which hath come, 
Through many ages, all our mental growth. 
Not in maturity — as from Jove's head 
The wise Minerva sprang — came forth mankind, 
But struggling upward in a toilful path 
From lower levels. In that brutal age 
When, crude and sluggish in his cloudy mind. 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Man first essayed to guide life's troubled voyage 

With wiser thought than native savagery, 

The feeble rays of unripe Memory 

Shone out alone to light his doubtful way; 

But, in their beams, his undeveloped brain, 

Thrilled with awaking powers, burst the dull husks 

Of an obscuring ignorance, and grew 

Up to the light; threw out each broader thought, 

As the vine flings long tendrils, till at length 

Grown up to pride of vain maturity. 

He deems the patient Memory lesser part 

Of present strength, and would degrade her rank 

From guide and counselor to toiling slave. 

With Memory's talisman we boldly press 
Upon the track of the all-conqueror. Time; 
Snatch, for an instant from his victories, 
A trophy; but, alas, how soon to yield 
It back, and learn we have not power to give 
New life to his dead victims; nor to stay 
A single file of all his countless host 
That sweeps unhalting in eternal march. 

But Memory hath a conjuror's wizard power 
To bring, for a charmed moment, back again. 
And rehabilitate with life, the Past — 
The Past as painted on the myriad foldings 
And tapestry of brain by artist hands 
Of toiling elves that fill the chambered dome 
Of thought with pictures numberless, but dim 
And overhung till Memory draws the curtain. 
And floods with gay or sombre light each scene. 



23 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Then, as by magic, every shape takes life, 

And, in a marvelous vision, scene by scene. 

Appears life's drama; nor a picture now. 

For, from brain-paintings, every puppet leaps 

To act his part of anger, sorrow, joy. 

As it is written in the Book of Life. 

A storm of recollections stirs the heart. 

Aroused again by tumult of emotions 

And quick pulsation of the thronging passions — 

By love, hope, fear, pricle, anger, jealousy. 

Ambition and regret — by all the host 

Of warrior passions, demons of dear sense. 

And the angelic spirits of our virtues. 

That throng tumultuous in the human heart. 

Crowding its narrow gates and crooked halls 

With mingled lines of marshaled combatants 

Who win for us our grandest battle-fields. 

Or stain the soul with tarnish of defeat. 

Or memories come, each other following 
Like the long swell of waves on simimer seas. 
Breaking in murmuring ripples at our feet; 
But, while we muse and lose ourselves in visions 
Of former happiness, the waves grow black, 
Their gentle murmurs changed to angry roar 
As the charmed sea chafes on its sounding shore, 
And back upon us sweeps the frightful storm 
That wrecked of old a fondly cherished hope. 
Our pensive thoughts would linger with the hours 
Friendship hath consecrated with its wealth 
Of generous sympathy and noble help, 



24 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Or Love, with tenderer touch, made more than 

hallowed. 
Stilling the heart's too passionate pulsations 
To measures of remembered happiness. 
But, like a spectre, often on such musings 
May come some cruel, haunting shape to point 
Where stand, unmasked of every specious doubt. 
The Present heaped upon them, our misdeeds; 
And what we would forget comes up again 
Out of the Past the clearer from immersion 
Within Time's sea that will not be a Lethe. 
Through the hot flood-gates of the conscious heart, 
Opened by hands of wakeful Memory, 
Pour past emotions; and our acts spring forth 
On this swift-moving flood, their own avengers. 
Or bringing the returns a busy Present 
May not have yielded to each modest virtue. 

Or Memory may adorn her fairest scenes 
With gay imaginations till they mock 
Beautiful picturings of artist's fancies: 
As skillful painter, by his coloring, throws 
On the fair scene of field, and wood, and stream, 
Such delicate charms that Nature is transformed 
To a fictitious beauty, so Memory 
Hath often gift of true artistic touch 
To blend imaginings with sober shapes. 
But charms of contemplation have been sung 
In choicer numbers than may grace my page; 
Then let me hasten on amid the whirl 
Of my great theme; — yet ere I leave thy name, 



35 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Benignant Memory, I would essay- 
To mark th' uncertain limits of thy realm, 
Tell how thy cloudy, visionary shores ' 
Touch on the life-thrilled province of the Present. 

Remembrance brings a train of captive facts 
Within the pale of judgment; builds a base 
On which the intellect may set its structures. 
Or Fancy rear her quaintly-fashioned shapes; 
Hands down, from predecessors, heritage 
Of science, literature, and mental toil; 
Presents the broad experience of the Past, 
Rigid in lines of immobility. 
By which to shape each formless circumstance 
Whose grasp creates the all-important Present. 

As the great volumes of the Past are filled 

With the unchanging print of actions done. 

We turn a page or two, and read the while 

Our acts are written there. We fain would change 

Or blot the words where Folly's reckless touch 

Or secret, or acknowledged, sin has set 

Its soiling marks on the accusing page; 

But find, alasl the Past cannot be changed. 

In ancient times they wrote on leaves of brass. 

Or golden tables, some important thing; 

And, in our day, we cut the granite's face. 

Or model metal into pictured shapes. 

In the vain hope to tell a future age 

Our thoughts, or acts, successes, or mishaps. 

The tooth of rust will gnaw the giant limbs 



26 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Of our Colossus, and our Sphinx may hide 
In shattered features what we bid her tell; 
Nor leaves of brass or gold, nor shapes of stone. 
Will long endure; each may record untruth; 
But fact fails not because the record fails; 
Nor shifts from ill to good though sculptures tell 
In deep-cut letters monumental lies. 

While Memory yields a never-ceasing store 
Of recollections, the great power to act 
Is vested in each rapidly flying instant, 
So brief a space no measure marks its breadth. 
Into this breathless moment leaps a thought 
Prompting the deed which cannot be undone. 
And so we set our acts along the lines 
Of circumstance; so grasp impending facts; 
So do the deeds that bring us honor, shame. 
Our best of happiness, or worst regret. 
Upon the future we may speculate; 
In memory dwell upon the fading past; 
One flitting instant only is our own : 
The Present stamps a seal on every act. 
Will stand unbroken through eternity. 



27 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



IV 

How many an eye, O burning lamps of night, 
Hath looked for comfort to your distant spheres. 
Seeking to calm the present's haunting fears 

By the pure talisman of your sweet light ! — 

Calm stars? Ah, no! Although serenely bright, 
A twinkling demon in each ray appears, 
A fiend that mocks at sorrows and at tears. 

And laughs derisive at the heart's affright — 
The demon, Change; and skies are not serene: 

Their silent beauty is a friendly guile, 

False, for those lights, so sweetly, softly seen. 

Are monsters roaring in a fierce turmoil; 

Yet each huge orb, as through wild change it 

flies, 
With peaceful beauty shimmers in our skies. 

When by the action of Primeval Force 
Creation was; when laws began to move 
The thinnest forms of matter in wide space 
That thrilled with impulse of awaking Nature; 
When out of nothing — wonder of miracles! — 
Throughout infinity of space awoke 
The law-poised atoms — woke to spin and fly 
Unresting ever in the countless years, 
Pushed on, as if across infinity; 
When, closing up, the neighbor elements 
Together drew, to social union driven 
And definite shape by instinct of that force 



38 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



That wrought the fabric of each balanced orb, 

And framed the architecture of the skies, 

Then Change had its beginning; nor hath known 

Leisure or stay since that eventful hour: 

Nor hath this restless agency of Fate, 

This t3n:ant of the subject universe. 

Suffered one weary atom to have rest. 

Agent of Fate? if so, perhaps a purpose 
Benign is in each seeming-cruel whirl 
Of Change, and every phase is healthful growth 
To a propitious end. But let us pause 
And listen to the marvelous din of movement; 
Behold the figures shift, and blend, and fade; 
Then, if we will, their ultimate meanings guess, 
And seek the clue through the bewildering maze. 

The ruler of our system — to whose heart 
The mystic ties of gravitation bind us; 
About whose kingly orb, in circling paths. 
Journey his planetary family, 
Cherished and warmed by life-bestowing beams. 
And strong upheld — is not exempt from change. 
The patient watcher at the telescope 
Sees, on the sun's bright orb, huge graven marks 
That come and go, pits, deep and inky black. 
Changing their shapes, and drifting o'er his face — 
Sees on his photosphere the impress of force. 
The boiling up of incandescent flames. 
Sudden combustions darting into space 
Thousands of leagues, falling again like rain, 
To be absorbed into his molten breast; 



29 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Nor to repose, for the tumultuous throes 

Which vex that monstrous bosom cast them forth 

High-hurled, as shot from angry crater-mouths. 

Mountains of flaming hydrogen arise. 

Each vaster than a hundred earths like ours, 

Showing, like saw-teeth, on his mighty disk; 

And sink, and rise again, fringing his edge 

With bright corona, many- tinted flres. 

Painting fierce action and prodigious change. 

Apparent motions of the starry host 

Have taught sky-gazers that the sun stays not, 

Fixed on his fiery center to one spot, 

Immovable amid the unceasing whirl; 

But that, across the boundless sea of space. 

His system journeys toward flashing deeps 

Alive with star-light; yet between whose fires. 

Open vast galleries for his great march, 

WTiile still the star-deeps brightly flash beyond, 

Nor wait his coming; but each sphere, propelled 

On orbit large, sweeps on its silent path — 

Silent to us because immeasured space 

Muffles the roar of monstrous chariot wheels 

And frightful clamor of each stellar flight; 

While all the lines of labyrinthian track. 

Traced upon ether by the flight of stars. 

The broad handwriting of the heavenly host. 

Are weird, mysterious cryptograms of Change. 

As the Sun changeth. Earth, his satellite. 
By smaller marks, reveals the same great hand 
Whose touch perturbs the blazing King of Day. 



30 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



How manifold the changes of the Earth 
Since it was gathered up amid the heavens, 
An infant world, and held in young Time's lap! — 
But wherefore young ? Nor young, nor old, was Time 
When, moving inward through impregnate space, 
Nebulous cloudlings, from their ether homes, 
Drew them together to create a world 
Of much attenuated elements 
And gases thin; or when, much wrought by force, 
And fashioned into being, this new world — 
A future home of animated life, 
A garden-spot for man to cultivate, 
Puzzling entanglement of many laws — 
Joined the great march of planetary spheres; 
Sailed in determined path along the heavens. 
But Time, grim nurse, took no more heed of it 
Than doth the sea of some bright-tinted shell 
Rolled up by murmuring tide on diamond beach. 
And flashing with gay brilliance as each wave 
Breaks on its lustrous curves in sparkling drops 
That cannot quench the gleaming opal fire. 

Ever from hour of her nativity 
Hath restless Change pursued swift-flitting shapes 
Whirled roundabout the Earth's rotundity; 
White, flaming fires condensed to solid mass 
Till, round her poles, long, sunless winters freeze; 
The cooling crust, up torn by inward throes. 
That greatly moved her heaving, fervent breast, 
Hath pierced the sky with cloud-capped mountain- 
chains; 



31 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



The seas have left their old, accustomed beds 
To pour their floods upon the sinking land; 
From out the deepest caves in ocean depths 
Great mountains, long submerged, have reared 

their heads. 
Lifting to laughing daylight mighty peaks 
That now rejoice to catch the sun's first rays. 
The glowing heralds of each new day's dawn; 
Sea-grottos, where the shark once wooed his love 
Deep under the blue tops of curling waves. 
Are now green valleys where the patient cow 
Chews the sweet grasses, and Arcadia smiles. 
While summer airs bucolic idyls sing. 

Change oft transmutes the varying forms of earth 
With a strange alchemy. The troubled atoms 
Hurry, at call of weird affinities. 
Or by the might of a subjecting stroke. 
To new alliances as brief as new; 
For scarcely are they joined ere they dissolve, 
While the quick doom of matter seems to be 
A ceaseless agony of dissolution 
And shifting shape; and life and death are names 
Of phases in the flitting cycles of Change. 
The outward forms of things inanimate — 
If aught inanimate exists on earth — 
As time goes on are wrought by constant powers. 
Shaping the contour of the spherical Earth, 
Rounding with equal care each rain-drop's globe. 
Dispersing it in so small particles 
It paints the sky with floating tints of beauty, 



32 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Till Nature rounds again its crystal sphere 

To launch it forth, at an electric signal, 

From the low bank of dark, portentous clouds. 

Form dies to give new birth; successive changes 

Clasp, each the next, a closely -woven chain: 

The animation of organic structure 

Runs a brief course through phases numberless 

To stop abruptly at the change of death. 

No shape of earth so firm, but at the touch 
Of wizard Change, as by the magic stroke 
Of an enchanter's wand, it melts away; 
Resistless might is in this giant hand 
To crush together, or to rend apart. 
The much-vexed matter. Yet each element 
Hath an undying life; no change can lose 
Its substance, or destroy its entity. 
Death is the action of organic laws; 
But when decay dissolves a concrete form, 
Or quicker rupture strikes organic life, 
The death of one foretells another's birth; 
From Phenix-pyre undying matter springs. 
Its atoms grouped anew in tint and shape. 
Death but the withered skin a serpent sheds. 
The recollection of a perished form. 
So from its broken chrysalis comes forth 
A butterfly to mock the hues of sunshine, 
And flutter brightly o'er its empty case. 

The works of man sink cnmibling back to dust 
From which, with painful toil, his hand had raised 
them; 



33 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



The works of Nature, stronger built and vast, 

Share the same fate, resolve and fail and change: 

The highest Alp that lifts its giant mass 

A-bove the clouds, stability's vain t)^e, 

Is beat by storms, and gnawed by countless years, 

Till, piece by piece, wild torrents drag it down, 

Or wilder winds its fragments launch in air. 

Man sees the myriad-aged mountains sink, 

But scarce can stay to moralize thereon; 

For, while he thinks, he groweth old, himself, 

Feels his own atoms fail; writes hastily 

"Life's lesson's Change 1" — drops wearily his pen. 

And points the sentence with the stop of death. 

Nor man alone, but all organic forms 
Of loose material, that Dame Nature breeds 
Into prolific life, the circuit make 
Of birth, maturity, decay, and death: 
The countless tribes of animated things 
That fondly cling to Earth's maternal breast 
Die on the lap in which they had their birth; 
While vegetation's mantle, wrapped aroimd 
The mother of all organisms, is green. 
Profuse, luxuriant, ripe — then fades and falls 
In withered piles of decomposing death. 
Closing a circuit of organic change, 
And leaving Earth, the nourisher, stripped of all. 
To shiver, with bared bosom, at the wrath 
Of Winter till young Spring, with touch of sunshine, 
Revives her, and a wealth of life comes forth 
From her prolific lap — no miracle. 
But law, more admirable than miracle. 



34 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



The thoughtful student, poring o'er the past, 
Can read, on rock-bound ribs of Earth, her story : 
Broad glacier-marks, the fossil shell, and leaf 
Are each an illustration of past eras, 
A picture printed in the Book of Years; 
While every order of successive layers 
Of earth deposits, or their wild disorder 
Where some fierce epoch tossed the broken ruins 
In varied slopes, or piled on edge the strata 
Thousands of calmer years combined to build, ' 
Are records how Earth's changing shapes have moved. 
The engraven annals of the centuries. 
Teaching his mind the broad historic truth, 
That Nature, by divinity of law. 
Hath wrought so carefully throughout the ages. 
By this unceasing change, that what we see. 
And what we are, this all-important Present, 
Is but the outgrowth of the ended years, 
And every period of the wondrous Past 
Hath marvelously pointed down to us 
As we point onward to a coming Future. 
Despite of time, a close relationship 
Exists between the first created germ 
And the last life prolific Earth hath borne. 

His mind goes backward from this elder day, 
And wanders in a reconstructed Past; 
Pre-Adamitic visions rise before him. 
The ghostly images of former times : 
He sees the gloomy foliage of fern-forests 
Dark overhead; enormous stems and fronds, 



35 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



As of a giant world, wave in the wind, 

And roar as their high branches swing and chafe; 

His breath is stifled by the hot earth's reek; 

Rank, sulphurous fumes are stinging in his nostrils; 

Pushing among the mighty stems of ferns, 

Or splashing noisily in vaporous seas. 

Move frightful forms of animated life, 

The saurian and the monstrous pachyderm — 

These hideous creatures scare away the vision. 

And, when he dreams again, the scene is changed 

To the chill whiteness of the Age of Frost: 

Now bright before him the cold glaciers shine. 

And one long Winter wraps the hapless world — 

A frozen world; white cliffs hang o'er ravines 

Of the same ghastly hue, save where the flashing 

Of weird auroras gleams along the snows, 

Painting their desolation with the tints 

Of wild diablery. Adown the sides 

Of the precipitous hills no torrents dash; 

No purple banks of clouds sail in the sky; 

Water exists but in its crystal forms. 

In phantom snow-wreaths flung o'er hills of ice; 

No pine-trees skirt the mountains' gleaming heights; 

No oak-clumps in the valleys — all is bare : 

Even the shadows, with their spectral gloom, 

Bring no relief to pained and dazzled eyes; 

It is a dead world in a frozen shroud. 

Shivering he drives away the dreary picture; 

Nor dares to summon up another age, 

Lest yet more horrid visions should appear. 



36 



Whisperings op the Sphinx 



V 

O Mother-Earth, so great thy family 

That little seems the care thou giv'st to one! 

Brood after brood thy countless children come 
Out of thy teeming ripe fecundity ! 
To thy maternity I make my plea : 

Is thy great mother-heart all cold and numb ? 

Thou hast a thousand voices; be not dumb! 
Or is it that we misinterpret thee ? 

And that, indeed, thy thousand voices tell, 

Thou hast a mother-heart that loveth well 
Thy children, all the hosts of life that cling 

To thee? Ah, yes; thy children know thee not, 
How fondly thou dost love each living thing — 

All — all thy mother-gifts how oft forgot! 

What changes yet remain, O Earth? what fate, 
What fortunes, hidden in the future, wait 
To make thy age more noble than thy past ? 
Or to extinguish all thy ancient honors ? 
We fain would wish thee greater fortunes. Earth; 
For while thou draggest climbing spirits down, 
Compelling us to yield to that gross law 
By which thou drawest to thy ponderous breast 
All matter kindred in its birth with thee. 
Thou hast our love : with all our dearest hopes. 
Our largest thoughts, our loves, our happiness. 
There mingles what is so allied to thee 
We dare not learn how close the kinship lies. 



37 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



What changes yet remain ? As it hath been 
Throughout the Past, must still the Future be? 
Always new phases ? the evolving plan, 
Of which thou art the appointed agency. 
Steadfastly moving on ? 

There was no sage 
In thy first hour to plot a horoscope 
From the portents of the bright, watchful host 
Of sister orbs that shone upon thy birth: 
If we would read thy fate, it may be found 
Figured in phases of successive change 
Upon the Past; and every phase a cipher 
In which is written shunless destiny. 
But our best science, groping in the dark, 
Can only chance upon some plainer parts 
Of a great scheme which we would fain piece out, 
Or wisely build with vain philosophy; 
Yet find our largest plans too small to reach 
Beyond ourselves, while stretching far away 
Are vast infinities, within whose depths 
Our grandest figures sink and disappear. 

Will still conserving laws hold, in firm grasp. 
Thee and thy fortunes ? or will Change unloose 
Thy bonded matter ? bid freed elements 
Fly off to join them with the neighbor orbs ? 
Or flit, blind meteors, rayless in the path 
Of a wrecked world ? Or will the hour arrive 
When, fading into nothing, vanishing 
Like dream forgotten with the morning sun 
Thou wilt be lost, at once plucked out of space, 



38 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Engulfed in darkness like a sinking ship, 

No trace remaining in the empty void 

To bear the record "There was once a world"? 

The startled heart cries out "This cannot bel" 

Forgetting that a greater wonder was 

When, through the slumbering halls of vacancy. 

The first call rang that broke eternal silence. 

And filled infinity with countless worlds. 

Ask we of Science what the years will bring 
To Mother-Earth? She, the inflexible. 
Can build, from prophet-shadows of the Past, 
The phantom of a corresponding Future: 
There is no void; the vast profound of space 
Is filled with ether; our terrestrial ship 
Cuts this thin substance as a steamer cuts. 
With her sharp prow of steel, the ocean waves; 
Plows through a medium so attenuate 
Our envelope of thin, encircling air 
Strikes it as would a sphere of hardest steel 
The thinnest air. Yet this ethereal sea, 
That laves infinity's most distant shores. 
Vast as eternity itself can be. 
Quivers elastic with the waves of light 
And its companion, heat; contains, within 
Its infinite diffusidn, agencies 
Of gravitation, of electric force, 
And all the potent energies of life; 
Within its well-knit substance firmly holds 
The countless systems of the universe, 
And matter is complete, one great machine. 



39 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Endless and voidless, simple and complex, 

Throbbing as if endued with conscious life, 

One organism built of many parts 

Of which our earth is but a molecule. 

This monstrous creature, framed without the 

bounds 
Of space, combines within one entity 
The sum of all : its tireless energy 
Compels all movement with exhaustless force: 
Translation, heat, light, organism, life. 
Its varied forms of action. 

But our Earth, 
The molecule, the atom of this thing — 
Leaving the whole, to watch a little part — 
What is the atom's fate ? The energy. 
Propelling now our globe through ether-depths. 
Will be resolved by variable degrees 
Into the form of heat. The viewless path, 
On which we move, obstructs our chariot wheels; 
The fires of friction slowly bum up force; 
Out of the ether fairy hands are stretched 
To stay our journey; nor are stretched in vain; 
Still we go on, as heedless of all this. 
But in a smaller course. The time must come — 
Though all our figures work not out the date — 
When these faint frictions will so change our 

march 
That solar gravity, preponderant. 
Will draw, by its centripetal constraint, 
Our Earth, in lessening circles spinning round. 
Into the fervor of its fierce embrace. 



40 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Mingling our little with its mighty mas&, 
The fused Earth-molecule dissolved in fire. 

It is but working the well-ordered plan 
That gathered up the nebulae in space; 
Fashioned the floating matter into orbs; 
Drew in those orbs to merge them into suns; 
To hurl in contact their enormous globes, 
Transmuting speed to heat. In that mad hour 
When all the movement of unnumbered years 
Is loosed in flame, a vast expansive force, 
Developed of diffusive power of heat. 
May hurl dissevered matter back again 
Into the limitless from whence it came 
By circling journeys of the ended cycle. 
Then the thin nebulae will fill again 
The long-deserted deeps of ether space, 
And the new Cycle, leaping into birth 
From a dead brother's grave, commence its march, 
Primordial atoms gathering into mass. 
To fashion worlds within the pregnant skies. 

So may we follow an imagined plan. 
Working from laws whose secrets, half-disclosed, 
Tempt us to guess at what remains unlearned — 
Yet doubtful of our steps; for it may chance 
That, while presumptuous Science builds her 

scheme. 
What we yet know may bear, to the unknown. 
Too small proportion, and our architecture 
May, from a false foundation, slip away 



41 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Like a fair city swallowed by the Earth, 
That, in volcanic rupture, widely gapes. 
Often our best imaginings appear. 
In dawning light of new discovery, 
False as fantastic figures of a dream. 
Futile as prophecy of raving madness 
That dresses every wild and whirling fancy 
In the material garb of sober fact. 



42 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



VI 
Wttnn 

What glitters, Ocean, in thy bosom bright ? 

Not starlight only gleaming on thy waves: 

How many a sunken fleet, in thy deep caves, 
Sends glimmering spectres through the dusky night, 
Weird phantoms rising to the realm of light! 

Behold the crescent Moon, as now she laves 

Her in thy tremulous flood, shine over graves 
Of myriads sacrificed to thy dread might! 

Ah, sailor, tell me not the sea's strange glow 
Hath natural cause! I read, in dancing lights 

That leap and flicker in the waves below, 
A legend written by the ocean-sprites — 

A legend full of wonders sad and strange, 

And pitiful disasters of sea-change. 

Blue Ocean shouts in noisy thunder ings. 
Or whispers, in low murmurings, of change; 
Nor ever rests; but moves from ebb to flood, 
From flood to ebb, a monster's half -day pulse. 
By light winds fanned, its curling ripples smile; 
By tempests tossed, its billows threat the sky; 
A fickle element, its smiles deceive; 
And hungry waters swallow the deceived — 
A type and agent of capricious Change — 
The lovely bosom of tranquillity — 
Marvel of majesty and Nature's might — 
The level plain on which rich commerce floats — 
A boiling whirlpool to engulf great ships. 



43 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Regardless of old Ocean's smiles or frowns, 
His smooth tranquillity or white-capped rage, 
A stately steamship crosses the broad sea. 
Day after day swift-sailing into the East 
Upon the oft-cut track of many keels. 
Hurrying on her course, with tremulous thrill 
Like pulse of life at each strong engine-stroke, 
She seems some mighty monster of the deep 
With breath of smoke polluting sky above, 
And fins of steel disturbing seas below. 
That backward gleam along her course for miles, 
Foaming and eddying, a huge dragon -track. 

The restless belt of the Atlantic waves 
Is traversed, and a few safe hours would place 
The ocean-voyagers in their destined port; 
The night is on the sea; mingling with dreams 
That hover over sleepers in the ship 
The turbulent waves join their unceasing din : 
The deep-toned voices of the ocean swell, 
Chanting the mighty anthem of the sea — 
Ill-fated ship, it is thy dirge they sing! 
Behold above the tossing waves a light! 
A ship? No: listen to the thundering roar! 
It is the sound of breakers. Ah, too late 
Their dreadful warning comes ! A heavy crash 
As if the earth upon its orbit stopped — 
A frightful, stunning pause. The mountain waves 
Roll high above — a moment hang — then fall. 
The boasted work of man's skilled handicraft 
Breaks like a nutshell in the mighty surge, 



44 



Whisperings or the Sphinx 



And, when the waves roll back, it lies, a wreck. 
Hoist out the boats'. — No boat can swim the 

surge 
Of that tumultuous sea. The shattered masts 
Fall crashing o'er the side; the waves leap up 
To clutch them with a thousand curling hands 
Of giant strength, and, howling, bear them off 
To tear in pieces on the pointed rocks; 
The planks are stripped, like ribbons, from the 

decks; 
Cabins and bulwarks — all are swept away; 
The great ribs crushed, and widely torn apart. 
A wild, mad hiss as deluged fires are quenched — 
The howl of winds — the frightful dash of waves - 
The ship in pieces — water everywhere — 
Men, women, children, drowned within their 

berths. 
Or, shrieking, torn from sea-swept decks away. 
No time to call on God : the wild of waters 
Greedily swallows into thundering deeps 
Each fear-chilled heart that wakes from dreams 

of peace 
To die too noisily for thoughts of prayer. 

Though the rough waves toss up their helpless 
prey; 
Though winds as pitiless howl cruel dirge; 
Though stretched neglected on the ocean-ooze 
The bodies of the drowned, uncared for, lie; 
Yet the stilled hearts know nothing of all this: 
The lost sea- voyagers have sailed o'er the brink 



45 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Of mortal life — one quick, tumultuous change 
Hath landed them upon that other shore 
Along whose edge mysterious sea-fogs hang. 
An hour ago the ship was ocean's lord; 
But, like a slave, the treacherous monster rose, 
And crushed with cruel blows his crippled lord. 



46 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



VII 



Ancient thou art, O War! Far off, I see 

Thy monstrous shape in mystic glory clad — 
A glory making fierceness wildly glad 

In epic song and mythic history. 

Not all thy widow tears, Andromache, 
Nor weeping of the Trojan women sad. 
Can drown the tumult and excitement mad 

That crown Achilles with the majesty 

Of glorious victory. Hereditary, 

Despite of gentler teaching, still remain 

The embers of our early savagery; 

And all the growth of mind hath yet the stain 

Of that wild passion of heroic joy 
That thrilled Greek warriors on Troy's battle- 
plain. 

In nature's sure decay, in accident, 
Infectious breath of pestilence, the wreck 
Upon the sea, the earthquake's yawning mouths, 
Th' electric bolt descending from the cloud ^ 
In all, humanity finds death's broad change; 
But yet must needs invent a larger means, 
A quicker way, to reach the end of life. 
Upon the field in marshaled ranks arrayed. 
And long, opposing lines of gleaming steel. 
Two armies meet with din of cruel war 
And sulphurous fires that light the path to death. 
When from resounding throats the cannon hurl 



47 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Through shattered ranks of men an iron storm; 

When beating drums and flying banners lead 

Long, glittering lines to War's red Feast of Blood; 

That demon revels in the battle-smoke; 

Laughs at the rattling sound of rifle-shots, 

Bursting of shells, and crash of cannonade. 

Gay plumed companion of the fatal one. 

When thy red hand is raised, Time sits him down, 

Drops his sharp scythe, to cast admiring eye 

Upon thy quicker work, while Pity weeps 

O'er agonies of victims struck by thee; 

Slain for thy frightful hour of vampire-life, 

That thou may'st drink the streams of flowing blood 

And revel in a carnival of Death 1 

Triumphal strains may sing of hero-deeds, 
Gilding with specious lustre War's fierce face; 
Thousands of voices loudly shout in praise 
Of those who come with laurel garlands crowned 
And victory's proud triiunph in their eyes. 
Forgetful in that hour how many deaths 
Have boimd the chaplets on the victors' brows. 
How many homes and hearts are desolate. 
The shining crowns of laurel leaves will fade; 
The noisy songs of triumph soon will cease ; 
While grief remains to wring a parent's heart, 
Sorrow to pale a widow's hollow cheeks. 
Suffering to hush the laugh on orphan lips — 
The victims' tears outlast the victors' joys. 

War is an ogre devastating nations, 

Seizing their youth and strength to feed his life, 



48 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Leaving behind him desolated lands 
Where only Famine and pale Woe remain 
To weep the rapine of his cruel greed — 
An ogre of more cruelty than Legend 
Hath ever pictured in her tales of Eld — 
A demon of more evil than the worst 
That Satan led in war against high Heaven. 



49 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



VIII 

I dreamed I sat upon an ancient mound, 
And mused of the old dwellers in the land, 
Who heaped the earth at some strange god's com- 
mand, 

Building with pious hands this sacred ground. 

While thoughtfully I mused, without a sound 
A figure rose, and stood with outstretched hand. 
Whose moiurnful gesture I could understand. 

My blood grew chilli At length, my voice I found: 
"Hast thou appeared, unearthly one, to tell 

The buried secrets of thy olden day. 
And sad disasters that thy race befell ? 

O speak, dim figure, and thy errand say!" 
I heard no voice from that companion dread. 
But night-winds whispered vaguely overhead : 

Man dies in full maturity of years. 
Or earlier stricken by the hand of Death; 
But leaves no vacant place: his progeny. 
Inheritors of what he once called his. 
Assume his place, and sit in ancient seats 
Of many ancestors till, called in turn 
To follow their dead fathers, they give up, 
With many groans perhaps, what use hath made 
Familiar, and depart to shadowy lands 
Of their belief; and so the race goes on — 
Not always: even the races of mankind, 
From natural order of inheritance, 



so 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Lapse into change. From heritage of lands 
Their ancestors had held a thousand years 
A people pass; nor leave untenanted 
The country that forgets them. On the track 
Of the outgoing race the incomer treads; 
And soon his busy life may fill the land 
So noisily, its din drowns dying legends 
Remembered only for a few brief years, 
Lingering, with shadowy recollections, round 
Secluded spots and lone, forsaken graves. 

Nor must we make a weary pilgrimage 
To distant lands to find an ancient grave 
Where we can sit and muse of Time and Change 
And a lost race; the graves are near at hand: 
In grassy vales through which the watercourse 
Winds its green track, meandering to the sea, 
Are vestiges of a forgotten people — 
Great mounds, with many-centuried oaks, chance- 
lodged. 
Of later growth upspringing from green slopes, 
Carefully shaped, the work of old-time zealots, 
Covering the earthen altars that yet hold 
The ashes of their sacerdotal fires. 
On craggy hill-tops run the broken lines 
Of scarce distinguishable forts o'er which 
Now blooms the wild rose; or, in later days 
Of hazy autumn, loaded grape-vines hang 
Their purple bunches ripening in the sun. 
Here once the lines of battle fiercely stormed, 
And red blood flowed where now red roses bloom. 



SI 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Or more remote, in forests of Copan, 

Are ancient sites of ruined, stone-built cities. 

Whose crumbling walls and statues — oft well-poised. 

Or fallen half -buried in the rank, black soil — 

Greet with mysterious mockery every eye 

That looks upon their marble solitude; 

While each grim figure, with time-mouldered lines, 

Seems striving still to tell its marvelous tale. 

These moimds, hill-fortresses, and chiseled statues 

Are antique moniunents of a dead Past — 

A people lost. 

In the forgotten time 
A nameless race set up its dwellings here; 
Here gathered into nations ; tilled the lands 
Tamed down from nature's wildness by the toil 
Of these dead husbandmen; here clustered homes 
And here grew up affections fervent, pure; 
And worthy lives were lived in that old time; 
And human passions wrought for good or ill 
As Virtue won her crown of sweet content. 
Or Vice upreared a hissing serpent-head — 
If we may judge this lost humanity 
By the known records of historic man; 
But lost are race, and name, and history. 
The ancient annals of the Western World. 
Here were enacted deeds perhaps as great 
As those recorded of the storied East, 
Scenes of sublimity we may not know 
Unless imagination penetrate 
The mouldered dust of buried centuries, 



52 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And build again decay and death to life. 

What wild, strange tales might their grim spectres tell 

If they could raise themselves from ancient graves, 

Rear up erect long-crumbled skeletons, 

And fill each hollow bosom with a voice! 

Here once was prosperous life, in whose best day. 

With smiling skies above, broad, ripening fields, 

Bright hopes and promises, no bodement told 

Of danger, gloomy days, impending death. 

Ere yet the shadow of the coming end. 

Darkening the beautiful to anxious eyes, 

Had crept upon their landscape, this lost race 

Built time-defying marble into cities. 

And cut engraven statues into shapes 

With careful chiselings of cultured art. 

In the vain hope to tell a future age 

The greatness and the glory of their race. 

Vain hope ! How false had seemed the prophecy 

If some Cassandra of a western Troy 

Had raised her shrill voice in its populous streets. 

And cried: "In vain! in vain! A time will come 

When none can read our sculptured monuments. 

Nor find, in one lone mound or fortress-hill. 

The story hidden in their long decay! 

Our deeds of might, worth, wisdom, wit, and skill 

Shall all be buried in forgotten graves; 

And strangers marvel — in these marble streets. 

Then desolate — who builded these carved stones!" 

But none of all the city's thousands then 

Had heeded her mad cries. As they beheld 

The land 's prosperity and teeming life ; 



53 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Saw on the river-highways busy fleets, 

Bands of corn-planters toiling in the fields, 

Swart workers delving metals from the mines, ; 

The stately chiefs, the marshaled ranks of war. 

The city-builders, and the artisans, 

The pious hosts that worshiped at the mounds. 

Or buried there the ashes of a king, 

A wise philosopher, a sainted priest — 

All this confirmed their greatness; and no doubt 

Disturbed their minds, that their great name should 

perish, 
Nor live enduring as their stone-built temples. 
Imagination so may picture them, 
But they have left us no historic trace; 
No living type descended from those days 
Of might and pride; no weak, degenerate child 
To boast the glories of his ancestry; 
No record of a name, or law, or deed; 
No story of the last catastrophe 
That brought oblivion to their stricken race. 

Yet this may be our fate. Such physical change 
As in the eras of geology 

Hath worked disturbance of Earth's broken crust. 
Contagion, failing nature, or a star 
Erratic hurled upon our sober sphere — 
A hundred causes could be found would lead 
To our destruction. As they passed away, 
So we, who have no more security 
Of life than they; no surer heritage 
Of Earth; no stronger grasp of future days; 



54 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Our life, mortality, estate, the same : 
Like them the atoms that a mighty Hand 
Scatters abroad, or kindly gathers up. 
Like lost Atlantis, in one whelming crash 
Our land may sink beneath a raging sea. 
Whose waters, foaming with volcanic fires. 
May boil above a buried continent; 
And millions perish, with one drowning cry. 
In death so swift they scarce may feel the blow, 
As died the nations of the Atlantian Isles. 

Whate'er the cause, the builders of the mounds 

Passed from the land, and left their vacant homes. 

Cities, and lands for other tenantry. 

Where by the stream or on the breezy hills 

The dwellings of the older people fell 

In slow decay, the savage Indian built 

His birchen hut; and roamed along the vales, 

And over the smooth sides of sacred mounds; 

Hunted, with primitive bow, the forest game, 

Or, with rude tackle, drew the river's wealth; 

But hastened from the hunt in forest glades. 

Or river fishing, to a cruel war 

With neighbor tribes, and feasted wild desires 

In fierce excitement of barbaric strife. 

No records tell us when or whence he came ; 

Mythical legends only left us now 

To sharpen the deep shadows that surround 

His coming and first dwelling in the land. 

He may have come in peace, or in fierce war; 

With overwhelming mmibers his wild tribes 



55 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



May have extinguished the more cultured people 

Who carved their statues and built marble cities 

Where now is wilderness in Yucatan; 

And who had raised, with pious hands, their altars 

In the more northern valleys; but at last, 

In desperate extremity of peril, 

Had stretched defenses on the craggy hill-tops, 

O'er which, victorious, fierce barbarians swarmed 

When civilization perished in the slaughter, 

Down-trodden there with art and aU the culture 

Of many peaceful, prosperous centuries, 

In the tumultuous rush of multitudes. 

Exterminated thus by savage war — 

Or yet more miserably by fatal pest; 

Or combination both of war and pest — 

They left the Indian master of the land. 

And only ruined monimients to tell 

Their race had ever been. 

From east to west, 
From Arctic winter to Antarctic ice. 
The Indian tribes filled the wide continents, 
Dreamless of Fate yet slumbering in the East, 
But soon to pour along Atlantic shores 
A locust horde; before whose fatal hosts 
Their race must wither, yielding life and land 
To pitiless invaders, till at last 
Swept from their homes — nor mound, nor ruin left 
To tell of rudest savagery — 
They yielded place imto another race. 

In a new dawn of knowledge there was one 
Looked, with clear sight, over vast wastes of ocean, 



S6 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Pictured broad countries set in equipoise 

On the round earth, the far antipodes 

To the known East, a new world in the West. 

The daring voyager, whose clear-seeing mind 

Had studied Nature in her many forms, — 

Had dared to doubt what all the world believed; 

Had dared believe what doubted all the world — 

Put forth his barks to sea; steered to the west; 

Sailed o'er the trackless blue to that far land 

He oft had seen in his prophetic dreams, 

Waiting his coming on the ocean's edge. 

That land he foxmd, and back returning told 

His wondrous story to the admiring world. 

A thousand vessels sailed upon the track 

Of the bold sailor who had shown the way. 

Landing their freights of men of eastern race 

In forest-homes of Indians of the West. 

Their races could not mingle; step by step. 

Each step disputed, was the red man driven 

Back from the ocean — back imtil his path 

Ending in mountains, deserts, or the sea, 

He could retreat no more: here, brought to bay. 

And tearing foremost hunters, died at last 

Contending for possession of a spot 

Where he might lay his weary body down. 

And where his bones might rest — but not in peace : 

The farmer's plow, upturning forest mould. 

Invades with sacrilege an Indian's grave. 

Thus hath the land been peopled, and grim Time 
Beheld the actors of Life's drama shift: 



57 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



One race its exit make, another come; 

But through all changes still the acts go on. 

Who lived before the builders of the mounds 

We cannot know, yet doubtless man was here. 

The silent relics of that early race 

Speak without words, as doth the ancient Sphinx 

Who sits embedded in the sands of Nile; 

And if one word could stir the moveless lips 

Of Eygpt's gods, or statues of Copan, 

Those stony mouths would surely utter "Change! " 



S8 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



IX 

ollf? J^all of lEmptr^a 

The might of empire — in its days of pride 

A massive rock on which all waves may beat; 

A tower of strength that nothing can defeat; 
Brightness of glory that must still abide — 
How long ? Till fortune's all-subduing tide 

Doth turn; the Fates its thread of life complete. 

Change is a common chance that all must meet; 
In greatest pride doth siure destruction hide. 

And must we read this lesson in the Past : 
Because old empires of the world decayed 

Is power a pageantry that cannot last ? 
Must splendor of dominion surely fade ? 

And all the great endowments of to-day, 
Must they, like ancient empire, pass away ? 

One day, upon his throne, Chaldea's king 
Sat with a clouded brow, and bade them bring 
From temple of the star-god, Baal, a priest. 
That, from black gloom, the king might be released; 
And, when he came, his deep-lined face expressed 
A withered age; him, thus the king addressed: 

"They tell me you are wise; then answer me, 
What is this vague, o'erhanging mystery 
That clothes my life with strange and sad annoy, 
Drowning in my pained bosom every joy ? 
Behold my glory! This proud Babylon, 
My seat of empire, sees my conquests won 
From half the world: the city that defied 



59 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Armies and nations, yielded ancient pride 
Before my car; the wealth of Tyrian shrines 
And golden palaces around me shines; 
And all Assyria's glory decks me now, 
Bound with Chaldea's empire on my brow. 
Babylon, queen of cities, is my own; 
And I have palaces, each one alone 
Rich as a kingdom; female slaves as fair 
As whitest ivory, their thick-tressed hair 
Of woven gold — but these no joys impart. 
Priest, can you cure the sorrow of my heart?" 

As cavemed waters, deeply gurgling, flow. 
Came the priest's answer solemnly, and slow : 

"The astral records of two thousand years 

Are in our temple, and a thousand seers 

Study their figures, tracing careful lines 

Of every star that on Chaldea shines. 

Upon these tabled figmres of the past 

Seven stars their ruling influence have cast: 

When grew Chaldea's empire, widely spread. 

With growing light the seven blazed overhead; 

But when her fortunes waned, pale grew the seven, 

Hiding their brilliance in the deeps of heaven. 

O king, alas! though, like a beacon fire, 

These stars proclaimed the fall of vanquished Tyre, 

Yet from that hour, their lustre grew less bright, 

Dimly retreating in the arch of night 

Until Chaldea's eagle-visioned seers 

Catch not the twinkle of their distant spheres, 



60 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



While hostile hosts look down with eyes of gloom, 

And angry heavens declare a coming doom. 

O king, Chaldea's twenty centuries 

Hang o'er her as a hundred winters freeze 

My aged blood ! Thy glory is the light 

Of sunset glow now fading in a night 

Of darkness, an enduring night whose mom 

Is in a distant time, a future dawn 

Too far for prophecy; — more near I read. 

In blood-red stars, the victories of the Mede, 

And lost Chaldea. King, thy sorrow strange 

Is the dark shadow of impending Change." 

And so the priest departed; and the king 
Tore from his brow Chaldea's monarch ring. 
And wandered forth in brain-distracted mood, 
Eating the grass with brutal habitude; 
And when a few inglorious years were o'er 
Chaldea's ancient kingdom was no more. 

All history shows, in harsh, unsparing figures. 

Gigantic marks of Change. Imperial power. 

Illustrious dignity, the might of arms, 

And empire's wide dominion — all of greatness 

Lost in the centuries, and all of glory 

Dim in their shadows. Pause and look behind, 

Down the long vistas of historic years. 

What grand examples do they show of change! 

Egypt, Phoenician Carthage, Macedon, 

And greatest of the antique nations, Rome — 

Where now are these ? Stupendous forms appear, 



6i 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Enthroned and crowned with empire's majesty, 
Vast, shadowy phantoms of the ancient time 
When each, in sceptred might, Colossus-like, 
O'erstrode, gigantic, their subjected lands; 
While weirdly gleams the flash of spectral light 
From graves of empire. Hollow voices cry, 
''We were the great of Earth in our great day; 
But Time and Change have swept our power away! 

Where now the occult science Egypt's lore 
Gave to the world when to her ancient sages 
Came student youth, Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, 
To drink with eager thirst of wisdom's cup — 
To catch, from lips of Isis' large-browed priests. 
The seeds of thought-matured philosophy. 
To plant and foster in barbarian lands 
Until they ripened in enlightenment. 
And civilization spread to all the world ? 
As drifting sand engulfs the palaces 
That Egypt reared in her meridian day, 
So sands of time engulf her history; 
Arts, wisdom, science, lost amid the years, 
With all the annals of her earliest life. 

Where are the ships of Carthage, that of yore 
Sailed out with merchandise, or armed for war — 
Adventurous beaks that traversed every sea: 
Along the coasts where Grecian Jason sailed 
To fruitful Colchis for the Golden Fleece; 
Beyond the pillars built by Hercules 
When he went out to capture Geryon's herds; 



62 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Or to those famous "Islands of the West," 

The far Atlantis of the Ocean Kings ? — 

Where are they now ? They sail the seas no more. 

Over the city of the Tyrian Queen 

The Roman drove his plowshare, and its tracks 

Sowed deep with salt, to show his bitter hate. 

Carthage destroyed, rebuilded and destroyed, 

Exists no more; a barren waste of hills. 

Where now archaeologists dig in her ruins. 

Searching for buried relics of her past. 

Is all remains of her magnificence. 

Where is the empire that the bounds of earth 
Confined in narrow limits of its map, 
Too small a kingdom for th' ambitious one 
Who wept for worlds to conquer ? Change on change 
Hath swept his land, and Macedon is now 
A province of the Turk; and the old tale. 
How crouched the East beneath the victor foot 
Of him who, in the Libyan desert, claimed 
Descent from Ammon, seems a fairy myth. 
The romance of an Eastern story-teller 
When the tired caravan at mid-day halts, 
And weary camels stretch along the sands 
While their swart- visaged masters sit them down 
To smoke their perfumed pipes, and hear a tale 
Of wondrous marvel, such as Scherezade 
Told to her Sultan in th' Arabian Nights. 

Where are Rome's armies ? In the olden time 
The trampling of her legions shook the lands 



63 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



From Tigris to the Thames. An iron war 
Poured from her city of the palaced hills — 
Where Janus' temple stood with open doors — 
As from Vesuvius or Etna poured 
Hot lava streams of fire. Her eagles flew 
O'er mountains, rivers, deserts, stormy seas, 
Stretching her empire round the trembling world; 
Subduing Britons in far distant isles; 
Crushing the Afric on his sandy desert; 
And driving all the North's barbarians 
To seek asylum on their moimtain-tops. 
In the rich East, Rome gathered dearest spoils — 
Spoils to despoil the spoiler: Asia's wealth 
Aiid Egypt's pomp relaxed the arm of War, 
And lost the victors in the siren charms 
Of Luxury and Sloth. While thus effete, 
On their soft dalliance came the locust swarms 
Of wild barbarians, Tartar, Scyth, and Hun, 
Who trampled down Rome's glory and her power. 
Now Roman war affrights the world no more; 
The Roman soldier and his victor sword 
S)mibols of the antique: they live in bronze 
To ornament these days; their lesson hid 
Beneath the glory of dead Caesar's name. 



64 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



X 

Deft hands of Change, the little and the vast, 
Are shaping progress; and each age, elate. 
Prides itself on its higher, broader state. 

And all things new and better than the past; 

Sees, in the present time, the proud forecast 
Of fortunes that, upon its progress, wait 
To make its era more supremely great. 

And win the world more happiness at last. 
The darlings of this progress — who can fill 

The list ? — Inventions, skill, philosophy. 

Wealth, culture, various fashions good and ill, 

Have each their claim of high ascendency; 

While the vain world, though oft neglectful still 

Of largest aims, grows wiser day by day. 

As in the past, the nations of to-day 
Are plastic to disturbing touch of Change 
That whirls upon them with resistless acts, 
Or shapes their destinies with slower care. 
Often Change comes in petty, trifling things 
Which we deride, or in the garb of fashions 
At which we laugh, but while we laugh, assume; 
Sometimes its progress hides in mysteries, 
Intricate problems that we cannot solve; 
Or the strong march of circumstances sets 
Broad marks upon the people and the land. 
Shaping opinion by the might of facts 



6s 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And breaking barriers which the centuries 
Have labored long to make impregnable. 

The rustic dwellers of an inland vale, 
Wondering, behold a busy, noisy band 
Invade their quiet fields. Across the stream, 
Along the valley, through the hills, toil these; 
Bridging, embanking, cutting, tunneling, 
And laying down, in straight or curving track. 
Their double lines of steel. The trespassed vale 
Sleeps quietly no more. The reaper turns 
To see a clashing train go swiftly by; 
The children run in terror to their homes. 
Or, with pale faces, peep from cottage doors; 
Cattle affrighted gallop o'er the fields; 
And dogs bark loudly. From the neighboring hills 
The mocking voice of Echo sends again 
Her murmur of the din. Swift to those hills 
The monster speeds; scared Echo's voice is mute; 
And all the tumult dies. But time goes on. 
And railway trains grow into common things. 
While populous towns spring up along their line. 

The youthful reaper who in wonder turned 
To see a thing of noise and smoke and strength 
And crashing wheels disturb his quiet day. 
Resumed his work again; but marveled much. 
As often on his mind the thought would push: 
The world hath stranger things perchance than this, 
Beyond these fields; — until, at length resolved. 
He leaves his scythe in less adventurous hands, 



66 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And goes to seek his fortunes "down the line;" — 
His fortune, work; of which in time are bom 
Knowledge and skill; these he brings back with him; 
And in those fields, where once he swung a scythe, 
Builds hugely up a gaping furnace-stack, 
And harvests iron as of old the grain. 

So progress makes marked changes in the land, 
And in its people. la the Past they lived 
In full content to cultivate the fields 
On which, like native growth of shrub, or tree, 
Or slothful cattle, fortune cast their lives — 
Content to obey the laws their fathers held; 
To question nothing in the plan of things 
They had not wit nor wish to understand. 
But changeful Progress, jostling men together, 
Provokes a multitude of teeming thoughts; 
All things are questioned; and the old-time law. 
Under the pressure of opinion, bends; 
'Tis propped perhaps, or some new form contrived 
To suit the fashion of the changing times; 
Or, if too long neglected, breaks downright. 
And greater change is built upon its wreck. 

Awakened thought disturbs the minds of men, 
And will not let them rest. What one man thinks 
Hath not, in him alone, disturbing power 
To move mankind; but his thought's progeny 
May stir the world in countries most remote; 
For, while he speaks, his thought is cast abroad 
As flies a feathered seed that chance may set 



67 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



In fertile soil, and kindly sun and rain 

Nurture to fruitfulness; the harvest often 

Beyond proportion to the slender planting : 

No seed so sure to grow as a new thought. 

Public opinion is the thought matured 

In many minds, the harvest of the seed — 

A harvest often overwhelming law 

Founded on old belief and precedent. 

As a mud dike goes down before the storm 

And wash of waves. The progress of the world 

Is by enlightenment of the general mind, 

That marks advance with corresponding change 

In the political and social state 

Of every people who receive its help. 

As knowledge, science, art, pour larger light 
On man's intelligence, it is as if 
He put a window in a dark, old tower 
Where dusky shadows long have had their homes. 
And where hath lurked the legendary ghost 
With bats, and owls, and creatures of the night. 
Now, from his ancient perch, the spectre flits 
To find a place of gloom; the light of day 
Dissolving its thin shape in mockery: 
This poor, light-haunted ghost is a fit type 
Of ignorance; for, in the kindling beams 
The new day sheds on yesterday's dull gloom, 
Old superstitions, born of ignorance 
And crafty frauds that would enslave the world, 
Long reared in darkness, are lit up by truth. 
And their grotesque proportions so displayed 



68 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



That laughter drives away the thmgs long feared, 
As a grown child laughs off a bugaboo. 

Could we anticipate the coming years, 
Outstrip gray Time in his untiring flight 
Through centuries, so looking forward, read 
The pages of an unmade history. 
What startling changes might such reading show ! 
What strange development of trifles now. 
Cast then enormous figures on the page 
To mock our prophecies ! How will the years 
Roll over men ? Will such progression make 
Them wiser, happier ? Will the heavy chains 
Forged in the Past, drop, one by one, away 
Till, free in soul and limb, our race shall stand 
Beneath the stars, a little less than angels ? 
Or will the ancient bonds, a heritage 
From all our ancestry, be heired along 
Our line, and keep its last descendant 
A bondman, though impatient of his bondage ? 
The nations of to-day, will they dissever 
As the old peoples of the past have done. 
And, gathered from their fragments, new states rise, 
To grow and flourish ? to decay and die ? 
What changes burden the immediate years. 
Rounding events our lives assist to shape ? 
This is no age of prophecy; no sibyl 
Now gives an answer to our questionings; 
But in the ferment of this strenuous age 
Who fails to see that large results are brewing ? 
That, in the menstruum of present movement, 



69 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Are greater transmutations being wrought 
Than wildest dream of olden alchemist ? 

Will War be laid away on marble tomb 
Like armored effigy of valiant knight, 
And Peace, with olive wreath on saintly brow. 
With sister, Justice, bearing equal scales. 
Sit the fair judges of each questioned claim ? 
Have years subdued War's fierceness ? sapped his 

strength ? 
Ah, no ! This demon, mighty in the past. 
Grows yet more lusty in these modern days; 
Nor feels the wasting touch of Time's decay 
On his strong limbs; but with a monarch's voice 
Bids Science bring him newly-fashioned arms; 
Knowledge equip his strength with each device 
Her cunning can contrive; and all the toil 
Of modem thought new-sharpen his old sword. 
Breech-loading weapons, guns of calibre 
Immense, steel battle-ships, impregnable, 
Armed with a force beyond the thunder-bolt 
The Greek imagined in the hand of Zeus, 
The world's vast workshops filled with armorers 
Forging with wondrous skill Cyclopic arms. 
From furnace doors the molton steel outpouring, 
Ton after ton, in gaping cannon molds, — 
Beholding Science toil, with blackened hands 
And sooty brow, thus forging giant arms. 
We may not dream War's fierce campaigns are over, 
Or that sweet Peace can steal away his sword, 
And teach the olden giant milder arts. 



70 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



To train the vine, to till the fallow earth, 
Or reap the rustling fields of yellow grain. 

O Change, thou art the spirit of the three — 
The fabled three who spin and cut life's threads! 
And from thy distaff run so many lines 
Of chanceful fortunes, weaving into webs 
Of strange entanglement about our lives. 
That, like a subtle, calculating Fate, 
Thy restless hand entwineth thread with thread, 
And fashioneth the fabric of the Future 
From the unfinished patterns of the Past: 
And human passions, hopes, and selfishness. 
War, Peace, Prosperity, Want, Famine, Death, 
Are figures woven in thy tapestry: 
As the life-roll unfolds they flash before us. 
Filling to-days and promising to-morrows, 
As they have done in many yesterdays. 



71 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XI 



Angel or brute ? What place in the great scheme 

Of life and progress is assigned to man ? 

He vainly strives to grasp the wondrous plan, 
But finds imagination's finest dream 
Fail to reach up to it. His life would seem 

Transferred by Change, since earth-life first 
began. 

From form to form: through countless eons ran 
Progressive t3^es. Till man appeared no gleam 

Of high intelligence illumed the Past; 
So doth he reason; and, from this, assumes 

In him the line completed; he the last; 
Nor deems himself a form that Nature dooms 

To pass from Earth as, in an earlier day. 

Crude, uncouth, monstrous creatures passed away. 

And man, himself, doth change in Nature's plan — 
Man, theme of every song he vainly sings. 
Nature's great egotist; for whom the world — 
Ay, the wide universe! — was greatly built; 
For whom the stars were set within the skies; 
For whom the glad sun shines, the moon revolves. 
The rainbow spans the clouds, the clouds are tinged 
With rainbow tints; for whom the flowers bloom, 
Summer with bounty smiles, and wholesome fruits 
Grow ripe in Autumn days; for whom the tribes 
Of lower life exist, his food, his slaves, 
Or idle playthings of his idle hours, 



7» 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Doomed, by his theories magnanimous, 

To please himself, then yield existence up 

Without a future, or another use; 

For whom, through the immeasurable lapse of ages. 

Matter was marvelously moved in space. 

By slow degrees Earth's masonry upreared, 

A palace builded for this haughty king. 

In whose bright halls he struts and domineers 

Through an allotted life so very short 

That, in the process of the general movement. 

It holds no measure with infinity — 

How doth he change ? Must he, perforce, believe 

In a development from lower things — 

From brutal tribes, he deems are far beneath 

His kingly rank; and these perhaps derived 

From earlier types of cruder animals, 

Descending in a nice, organic scale, 

By mystic laws through vegetation's forms. 

To find gross parentage in the primitive rocks ? 

This origin hurts his pride, too greatly vain 

Of his high powers and higher destiny — 

Which fond desire hath largely pictured out 

On the wide canvas of post-mortem life — 

To listen to the claims of Mother-Earth, 

Or to acknowledge kinship with the sod — 

Too much incredulous of power and goodness 

To think God's scheme is large enough to hold. 

In the wide halls of its futurity, 

Aught but his self-elected, fortunate race. 

Yet all his science reads the Past in vain. 

Or points along a path that leads him down. 



73 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Not up, in scale of things intelligent, 

In every search to trace his ancestry: 

Through the lake dwellers and the age of stone. 

Rude cave-men dwelling, like the brutes, in dens. 

Comrades of mammoth and rhinoceros. 

Back to the days when the wild forest glades 

Shook with the terror of gorilla shrieks — 

When, monarch of the wild, the primitive man 

Waged dreadful battle with enormous brutes, 

Himself as brutal as his hunted quarry. 

But king of brutes by right divine of valor; 

Oft moved, perhaps, by strange and fitful dawning 

Of an intelligence one day to crown 

With kinglier glory his posterity. 

Finding this genealogy, far-traced. 

Dragging a loathsome track, through brutes, to 

earth. 
Not winging back to kindred angels, man 
Turns to re-search more carefully the past, 
To find the clue that leads him up, notHown; 
But all in vain: throughout the paths of earth 
Are found life's foot-prints and their changing shapes, 
Showing slow growth from crude, inferior being 
Upward to man. From the first dawn of life. 
Each in its wonderful diversity, 
MoUusk, worm, insect, reptile, fish, bird, beast. 
And all the myriad forms of vegetation, 
Have joined one vmiversal prophecy. 



74 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XII 

There is a fable of a god of old, 

A Titan son of Earth in mythic day, 

Who fashioned men most curiously of clay; 
But they were lifeless; so the tale is told. 
To give his creatures life, the Titan bold 

Climbed up to Heaven — Minerva showed the 
way — 

And stole, from chariot of the sun, a ray 
Of fire, whose energy was manifold. 

To fill his men of clay with godlike force: 
A double gift was in the heavenly fire, 
To move dull clay, to give it consciousness: 

Earthly the men, but from celestial source 

The power of mind to make their thoughts aspire, 
And all the might that human acts express. 



The chemist tests a fragment of the earth. 
Counting the elements therein contained. 
If we may do the like with all the world. 
Making analysis of Nature's mass. 
We find three elements compose the whole — 
Consciousness, matter, and a moving force. 
Matter unmoved by force had been but death; 
For life means more than one commanding touch — 
Than merely a creation : one quick change 
From nothingness to being would have thrilled 
Infinity; and, after that, a sleep. 



75 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



The Power that made creation would have shown 

A barren exercise of useless Will, 

Filling infinity with stagnant death. 

No ! to all things create, an attribute 

Of Primal Power was given: force, like a storm, 

Came down upon the new-bom atomies. 

And drove them madly on. No lifeless sleep 

Was the great purpose of Creative Thought 

In the conception of far-reaching matter. 

We cannot read the purpose of creation, 

But know so much: whatever be the end, — 

If end there be — it will be wrought through changes 

That work so busily about us now. 

Molding Earth's substance as a potter molds, 

And spins to shape, a lump of plastic clay. 

Matter and force I — ^how mightily they move. 
And in what puzzling ways of intricacy, 
Driving on blazing paths enormous suns. 
Sending quick telegrams through nerves of life, 
Painting with brilliant hues a butterfly. 
Writing a history on the rind of earth! — 
Matter and force! still the great acts go on: 
Around us the phenomena of Change 
Present continuous action, mingling whirl 
Of many wheels that make confusing hum; 
Yet all subserve one purpose and one will. 
While, through their clatter, Time his pendulum 

swings. 
Telling that Nature moveth ever on 
With certainty. What is the purposed aim 



76 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Thus meant by Change ? Why this machinery 

Whose ceaseless movement rattles in our ears ? 

What does it mean ? — weird riddles of the Sphinx 

That broods upon the world's deep mysteries. 

And hereupon more puzzling riddles hang: 

The third great element in Nature's plan, 

A consciousness that gathers to itself 

Matter and force to shape them into thought, 

Is, with both force and matter, closely mixed 

In its own being. Wherefore are we here ? 

What is the purpose of the life of man ? 

Is it to eat and drink and fill each sense 

To full satiety with animal joys ? 

Is it to sleep a lazy lifetime out 

As one would doze away a dreary stage ? 

If such the purpose, the machine is built 

Too finely for its use. Beneath the whole, 

Matter and force and vital consciousness. 

The mystery lies, obscurely hidden from us 

In the dim fog of our dull faculties 

That cannot see beyond their own gray haze 

The clear, bright beauty of the Master-Thought, 

The simple purpose of the numberless wheels 

Of this bewildering Change. Perhaps in vain 

We weary brain and heart to learn the thing 

Too broad for our conception. In our school 

We sit as yet upon the lower seats. 

And study rudiments; the time may come 

We shall sit higher. In the forms of Change, 

And Nature's processes, is written wisdom : 

May not our mission be to study Change ? 



77 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



From tangled intricacy evolve its laws ? 

The mind's broad powers point to such design, 

A nobler use than feeding passion's fever, 

Gorging brute sense, the lethargy of slumber. 

Or dragging thought on tramways through our lives. 

If 'tis too much to hope to know the whole. 

Then we may learn a little; lift ourselves 

Toward the light whose glimmering intimates 

A wise intent hath drawn the myriad lines 

Of puzzling maze, to us a labyrinth 

Without an Ariadne's thread to guide. 

Matter and mind, in their dependency 

And close relation, make a serious problem 

Whose study, though it yield us no solution, 

May slowly bring us intellectual growth. 

And ripen mental strength as, step by step. 

We rise to level of each higher thought 

That brings us nearer to the wondrous plan, 

Now far beyond the present reach of mind. 

The other end of life's entangled skein. 

Meanwhile we must content us to go on 

Still in the rudiments, and leave the end 

In the safe hand of an unfailing Wisdom 

That fashioned matter, lent it living force, 

And placed man's consciousness amid its whirl. 

Force into matter — the result is Change : 
Action that sends far-traveling sun-rays forth; 
That molds the things of Earth; that governs men, 
Their races, nations; that disturbs the seas; 
That through all nature builds the countless germs. 
Developing a universal life. 



78 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Force into consciousness — there still is Change; 

The human mind is not a steadfast thing; 

If immaterial its substance be, 

It hath so much analogy with Earth 

To feel the active tyranny of Force, 

And dance with atoms in their frenzied whirl. 



79 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XIII 

Identity? Nay, is it not a dream, 
This oft-recurring fancy of my brain, 
That in the whirl of life I may remain 

O'er fate and fortune happily supreme. 

While Change transforms all else ? How false to deem 
That I, alone, am stable! And how vain 
To think, amid life's hurry, joy and pain. 

To stay the rush of Time's impetuous stream! 
A little child laughs gaily as he sails 

On boyhood's sea, his life a merry play; 

Strong manhood thrills while passion's stormy gales 

Blow round him, life a stern reality; 

While lingering Age recalls his earlier days — 
Can one identity run through the maze ? 

I dare not hug the thought that I, myself, 
Am constant to myself; for yesterday 
The sunshine and the lovely bloom of flowers. 
By some sweet mystery, seemed parts of me; 
But while to-day the same bright sunshine glows, 
And loveliest flowers, of dainty tint and shape, 
Put forth their bloom and perfume round my way, 
Their beauty is a cruel mockery. 
Like tempting grapes to hunger-wasted lips 
Of tortured Tantalus. Are happiness 
And misery the same ? Alas, in me 
The change ! There was a gay and radiant time 
When bright Romance hung garlands on each chance 
Of smiling fortune; and a dismal time 



80 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



When mocking demons plucked away each charm 

That sweetens life; the great world desolate 

And dreary; beauty, the unworthy tints 

Painted on shameless cheeks to hide decay — 

A time of buoyancy — a time of gloom — 

Time of credulity and time of doubt. 

It is within my bosom and my brain, 

Not in the outward world of facts and forms, 

These changes have been wrought; they came to me 

By sympathetic ties of Mother-Earth; 

By oft experience of matter's change; 

In joy's gay laugh; in disappointment's tears. 

Through all the action of this busy scene 

Phase follows phase as spokes flash round a wheel : 

So closely crowd conditions on the mind 

That momentary beings pass away, 

Leaving faint impress on the heedless brain, 

And new ones dawn, which in their turn give place 

To others, thronging there, to flash and die. 

Dividing life in parts so numberless 

We cannot stay to mark or measure them. 

Great epochs, crowning changes, come to all. 

Broad tide-marks, where the swelling flood of fortune 

Floats our life-ship upon a glorious sea. 

Or in its ebb, upon some dreary shore, 

Wrecks and destroys hope's richest-freighted voyage — 

Eras on which Remembrance loves to dwell; 

Or pale-faced Misery in sorrow broods. 

These are apart, perhaps with years between, 

While woven round in many-colored web. 

The various fabrics of the lives of men. 

In diverse patterns curiously are wrought. 

8i 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XIV 
Ei^t lltnh (BahhtBB 

"I am too happy! " the rich Lydian cries, 

And throws his costliest ring in the deep sea; 

Then homeward sails to feast and revelry. 
To the stern Fates he makes his sacrifice; 
Believes his jeweled ring their favor buys. 

When now the king is dining happily 

They serve a fish of wondrous rarity, 
That morning caught, a huge and luscious prize — 

What doth the carver give the startled king ? 

The sea returns the monarch's precious ring! 
Pales the king's face. "Alas! alas!" he cries, 
"The cruel Fates my costly gift despise! 
Look down, Apollo, from our Lydian skies, 
And quench the hate in the fell sisters' eyes! " 

I must not trust the pleasant promises 

Of smiling Fortune; nor forget, the fillet 

That binds her eyes may hide her mischievous guiles; 

Nor grow enamored of her sunny looks 

And dangerous charms until they drive away 

Prudence, protecting fears, and recollection 

Of all the lessons of her frail caprice. 

I may not rest in safe tranquillity. 

Though custom tell me that to-morrow's dawn 

Will be as fair, its summer blossoms open 

As sweetly, as to-day's. If charmed and drugged 

By poppy-perfumes of my happiness, * 

I dream of bright to-morrows; weep, perhaps, 



82 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



O'er woes that touch my neighbors — tears soon 

dried 
In my own pleasant sunshine — nor believe 
Calamity can come to cast its shadow 
Upon my pleasant life; so perilous dreams 
May be the prelude of sad opposites 
And dread realities. How rude the shock 
To see th' enchanted palace of my joys 
Sail suddenly away! bare, dismal deserts 
Mock my dismay! — to mark on friendly faces 
The sympathetic limning of the grief 
That tortures me ! Philosophy, alas. 
In thy cold schemes there is no sovereign cure 
For broken hearts! Thy wholesome antidotes 
Must be preparatory to our hurts, 
And temper joy's wild flush with calming thoughts 
Before calamity's black days appear! 
As in romantic tale an errant knight 
Puts on his strongest suit of proven mail 
When he would venture in enchanted lands. 
Or through the magic halls of some charmed castle 
Where gorgeous beauty shines in golden splendor ; 
So we should buckle wisdom's safest harness 
Securely on our bosoms when we go 
To meet the fairest fortune, lest beneath 
A Siren smile may lurk a Siren's guile — 
Harness of wisdom on whose cold, steel rings 
Misfortune's arrows may unhurtful fall, 
And rough Adversity's malicious blows 
Rattle in vain. When Fortune sweetly smiles 
Let us remember what a sage of old 



83 



Whisperings op the Sphinx 



Declared: "No one may say, 'Happy am I,' 

Until his life hath reached a happy end"; 

For lo! the demon, Change, uplifts his head, 

And Croesus is despoiled of coimtless wealth, 

His haughty forehead leveled in the dust, 

His crown exchanged for fetters of a slave. 

Nay, man knows not his lines of destiny; 

Draws not the figure of each act of change: 

Defeat or victory — a prize or shame — 

Master or fugitive — a throne or chains — 

As Fortune turns her wheel! From greatest height 

Is most disastrous fall; then happy he, 

Perchance, who, little rising, little risks — 

But so nobility of life were lost 

With all the high ambitions of the soul: 

Who greatly risks for good may laugh at Fate; 

For, failing, still he wins despite of Fate. 



84 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XV 

Each of the Earth's great human brotherhood 

Who breathes to-day dear life's vitality 

Finds in his heart sweet Hope. Although he be 
Of an imcultured mind and fortune rude, 
Or scholar trained to mental aptitude, 

A savage in his wild barbarity, 

Or learned doctor of philosophy — 
Each, in his thoughts, though in much-differing mood, 

Through all his wisdom, or his ignorance. 
Feels there is hope in every mystery, 

A golden thread within the web of chance 
In the unfolding of life's history. 

My fond desires have countless millions known; 

And millions yet to be will make my hopes their 
own. 

A mother looks with wistful wondering 

In her child's infant face, and while she soothes 

His little murmuring, fondly speculates 

On what the future hath in store for him; 

In the soft beauty of his baby smile 

Sees promise of a bright prosperity; 

Kisses his chubby hands and dreams of fortunes, 

Beyond the luck of all his ancestry. 

Waiting her darling in the coming years. 

So Eve, proud mother, glorious life imagined 

For Cain, the first-bom of the sons of men , 

And first of murderers, as he lay, a cherub. 



8s 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



In smiling innocence in her fond arms; 

And so the Hebrew mother of the traitor 

Among the twelve dreamed that her son might 

win 
The plaudits of the world. The morn of life ! 
What countless possibilities appear 
Awaiting him whose little, untried feet 
Press on life 's threshold ! Will he win, or fail, 
Amid the changes of his swift career 
From cradle to the grave ? His infancy- 
Is passed in prattle, wonder, laughter, shouts, 
A few half -smiling tears. The magical touch 
Of Change soon brings to his bright, laughing eyes 
A look of thought; his golden hair grows dark; 
The dimples disappear from his round cheeks; 
And his fond mother sees, with happy pride, 
Her baby grown a tall and manly youth. 
He feels the change with many a tingling thrill 
Of quick emotion. In his bounding heart 
A hundred sanguine hopes, with joyful cheer, 
Shout happy fortunes. Life — |;hat in childhood's 

eyes 
Seemed a long stretch of unknown galleries 
Dim in the distance — by enchantment now, 
And sudden birth of potent intuitions 
Responsive to his own awakenings. 
Catches bright lustre from his glowing thoughts, 
And shines illumined, like a summer dawn. 
With rosy light; soon casts each veiling shadow 
Of morning twilight, and arrays fair shapes 
In all the gay enticements of delight. 



86 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



As if the signal-bell had loudly rung 
In life's great theatre, the curtain lifts, 
And shows a marvelous scene, as beautiful 
As new; on which not only his glad eyes 
May gaze, but his elastic footsteps tread. 
Enraptured doth he pass the golden gate 
Of the charmed garden of the Hesperides — 
Enchanted by twin spells of youth and hope. 
The golden fruit hangs yellow o'er his head; 
The dragon sleeps; he laughs to see the prize 
Within his reach and bending to his hand. 
Yet, ere he plucks, fair Pleasure smiling comes. 
And beckons him to join her laughing train, 
And revel with her and her rosy Hours. 
Then buoyant youth, in his glad heart, exults; 
The merry dance, the jovial crew allure; 
Life's prizes are forgotten in that hour 
Of sweet enchantment and beguiling joys. 
Trampling beneath his hasty, careless steps 
The fragrant roses, he would catch each joy 
That laughing flies, while laughing he pursues; 
Turns to each fairy shape that gaily flits 
On Surmner wing like bright-hued butterfly; 
Sleeps amid flowers, to wake and laugh again. 
And drink, to fifll satiety, delight. 
But the gay laugh at length forsakes his lips; 
The garden blossoms fall from withered boughs; 
The golden fruit, that dazzled once his eyes, 
Unplucked, neglected, rots upon the ground; 
Pleasure departs with all her noisy train, 
A cynic sneer upon each back- turned face; 



87 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And sweets grow sour; the dragon from his sleep 

Awakes; and Danger threatens in the paths 

Where Pleasure danced with sweet, seducing wiles. 

Maturity now gathers up his powers 

To fight the dragon, though the guarded prize 

Be lost; and if he win, or if he fail, 

The golden opportunity, once his, 

Returns no more. He deems youth's darling hopes 

The vain illusions of green ignorance; 

Pleasure's bright joys, the tinsel of a show; 

The garden flowers, rank weeds without a use; 

Beauty too often falsehood's painted mask. 

Strong in himself, he sets his brain and limb 

To win his way, and if to victory. 

It is by help of the fair hand of Fortune, 

Or by his own strong heart. The will to dare 

Is a charmed talisman to win success : 

The world gives place to him who dares to take it, 

Denying name and trust of leadership 

To careful prudence, or slow steps of wisdom, 

To cast them down before the resolute foot 

That leaps unshrinking to the front of perils. 

The while his star of fortune brightly bums, 

His course is ever onward. He achieves 

Perhaps beyond the visions of his youth: 

What then had seemed above even daring's reach 

Is now within his grasp; — but while he boasts 

Of robust strength, feels Time's so heavy hand 

On his strong limbs, and failing muscles shrink — 

On his wise brain, and memory vainly seeks 

To hold the thought in which his thought was strong. 



88 



Whisperings of the' Sphinx 



While yet he strives to renovate his strength, 

Hears his grandchildren prattling of his age; 

Strokes his gray beard, and tells the youngsters tales 

Of what their grandsire did; sleeps in his chair 

In dozing dullness while quick-footed hours 

Run past him; wakes to prattle like a child 

With little, merry laughers 'round his knee; 

But sleeps at length more soundly, and is laid. 

With funeral honors in a grave-yard bed. 

Or marble tomb ; on which, perhaps, is set 

A monument, whose cold, deep-chiseled words 

Record his name and age, or haply make 

A line or two of title, place or rank. 

On which his children gaze complacently; 

Or scrap of verse, which soon becomes antique. 

And makes the curious reader smile the while 

He muses on this record of a life. 



89 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XVI 
©tj^ pBgrI|p'a 3fntuttt0tt0 

*'It is a god!" the Egyptian artist cried. 

"It thinks! How dared I, poor earth-creature, cut 
The stone that holds a god! Back to my hut, 

And from the mighty one, with trembling hide — 

How wonderful, my chisel deified, 

With clumsy art, the power and grandeur shut 
Within the rock! — My rude hand wrought it not: 

No art of mine could thus my chisel guide. 

What is its thought ? I know not. Who can tell ? 
Too wise for me the purposes that dwell 

In that stone face. Perhaps those lips, now still, 

May one day speak; that brow, for good or ill, 
Unfold the wondrous mystery divine 
That mocks me now from every graven line." 

In the capricious bosoms of mankind 
Religion hath as often varying form 
As mind's diversity: calm, vehement, 
Austere, or cheerful, full of gentleness. 
Or harsh with rigor of compelling fires. 
Filling glad hearts with joyful promises. 
Or mortifying life with pains and cares. 
It howls and whirls in frenzy with the dervish; 
Fasts with the lonely hermit of a cave; 
Falls into prayer with Moslem when the call 
Of blind muezzin sounds from minaret; 
Builds the great dome of holy Peter's church; 
Or travels, footsore, to some sacred shrine. 



oo 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



With a devoted band of pious pilgrims; 
With Epicurus laughs; with Cato frowns; 
Or with Diogenes finds happiness 
When the blest sunlight shines upon his tub; — 
Yet, under many forms, one principle 
Maintains, the common mover of men's hearts: 
A keen perception of th' imresting force 
That drives its chariot wheels around the Earth, 
And flashes change from every star of heaven, 
Combined with consciousness of impotence 
To stay one atom or delay one change. 
Compels the worshiper, on bended knees 
To lift his prayers to some symbolic god. 
Or bow his soul before the mastery 
Of an omniscient and eternal Power. — 
The creature calleth to divinity. 

The savage lifts to his bright sun-god's face 
Worshiping hands; adores the silver moon; 
Hears a god's voice in the deep tones of thunder; 
Beholds his anger flash from night's deep gloom 
In crooked, dazzling lines of blinding flame: 
He worships an ideal of light and might 
Enthroned mysteriously above the skies. 
But when, instructed by conceptive thought. 
Or prompted by imaginative dreams. 
He fancies likeness to his intellect 
In powers that change material shapes of earth, 
Then powers of intellect become his gods 
Garbed in the forms of man, or manlike beast. 
Thus the old Greek, with ardent, artist mind, 



91 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Set on Olympian heights the thunderer, Zeus, 
And heavenly court of his Satumian kindred. 
In Egypt broader thought built larger gods, 
Symbols of force and of prolific Earth, 
The great high-priests of a yet higher One, 
But dressed in attributes of earthly life. 
Mind was the moving power behind them all, 
Compelling worship ; man prostrated him 
To forms of marble, bronze, or painted wood, 
Because his mind adored ideal mind. 
And here its symbol, though the worshiper 
Oft, in fond ecstacy of fervent zeal, 
Looked not, perchance, beyond the symbolism. 

The larger culture of Egyptian priests 

Decayed with age; Osiris, Isis fell. 

And smaller gods were set upon their thrones. 

O'er classic Greece and Latin Rome swept hordes 

Of fierce barbarians from th' uncultured North, 

Trampling soft luxury's minions underfoot. 

Upsetting empire, crushing old-time rule, 

O'ertuming statues of divinities 

And sacred altars on whose carven shapes 

The Greek had lavished all his matchless art. 

The sire of Saxons, large-limbed, flaxen-haired. 

Dashed with his ponderous axe the front of Jove; 

Clutched with fierce bands the radiant, golden zone 

Of Venus; robbed god Mercury of his wand; 

And laughed disdainful of such ones set up 

In pomp of temples for a slavish worship. 

In the religion of the servile South 

The Northman sowed the seeds of bolder thought. 



92 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Conception of a better heritage 

Beside, and not beneath, divinity. 

Not abject adoration, but a claim 

In right of manhood marked his nobler worship. 

Meantime was bom a large philosophy; 

Out of a people's lowest rank was given 

The pure example of a blameless life; 

And lowly, from the midst of artisans 

And simple fishermen, came forth a voice 

That taught, the purpose of life's scheme is love 

A love that gathers to one Father-heart 

His children, where the outcast, wretched leper 

Hath equal place beside the sceptred king. 

Too broad a theme I the narrow-thoughted ages 

Caught but a glimmer of the kindly light 

Thus offered them; and though the Pantheon 

Was emptied of its olden deities, 

Their counterparts were set in each high niche: 

A Mary on the pedestal of Juno, 

And row of sad-faced saints upon the blocks 

Where once were poised the hero gods of Rome. 

Still over all swept Time, th' iconoclast. 

And many saints were hurled from sacred place 

To mingle fragments with the broken gods 

Of dead mythologies; and the sweet light 

Of love was shadowed in the human heart 

By superstition, ignorance, lust of power, 

And a vain-glorious zeal of proselytism. 

Flashing and flickering in the stormy breath 

Of passions — as a blown torch flares about 



93 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



In windy gusts, sometimes almost put out, 

And the next moment flinging forth bright flames 

This theme of love, aU-love, ill-comprehended. 

Prompted the dogmas of conflicting creeds, 

Divided churches; lit the cruel fires 

That burned the martyrs; sent brave exiles forth 

To plant their faith in lands beyond the sea. 

So hath Religion, like fantastic masker. 
Appeared in many shapes and various dress; 
But yet, within, a moving instinct, held 
Unchangeable its grasp of worshiping hearts; 
And we, to-day, feel the submissive awe. 
That bowed our ancestors to wooden blocks, 
Bending us down, each to his chosen ideal. 



94 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XVII 

The sun was rising o'er the desert's rim, 
A globe of fire, when a lone Arab cried. 
Low kneeling by his dying camel's side: 

"Help me! O help me, gods! Misfortmie grim 

Hath overwhelmed me, spirit, heart and limb ! 
What god can find me in this desert wide?" 
"Cry not to gods until thou first hast tried 

To help thyself!" a genie called to him. 
As o'er the desert waste on mighty wing 
He flew. "Seek thou thy gods, nor feebly stay 

Their coming! Straight to the northward must thou 
fare 
Unto a well; thou hast the strength will bring 
Thee safely through, though weary be the way; 

There is thy god: go thou and seek him there!" 

As Science is released from brutal grasp 
Of Superstition, in her gratitude 
She fills the world with cheerful promises 
And ready help ; elucidating puzzles 
That long have vexed bewildered intellect; 
Gathers and classifies determined facts; 
Reads many laws ordained to rule and move 
The primal atoms that creation gave; 
Clearing the way for broader reach of thought, 
That men may look above with grander zeal 
Than object-worship shining in their eyes. 
While building the high throne of deity 



95 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Grander and brighter than blind adoration . 
Hath skill to do, she whispers to the souls 
Of worshipers suggestions from the thought 
That all the showings of nice powers of sense, 
All that wise thinkings yet have raveled out 
From the confusing maze of intricacy. 
Are little parts of a well-ordered whole. 
The simpler figures of an infinite scheme 
Where relative conditions are the words 
God speaks to man by Nature's myriad tongues. 
Thus placed, a scholar in the school of life. 
He needs no more such symbols, as of old, 
To give his mind communion with his God : 
Nature gives larger symbols, in its facts, 
Than grandest imagery of the ideal — 
A positive showing of the Infinite Will — 
Letters engraven broadly on the world, 
Telling of power, beneficence, and love. 

Science is knowledge classified, a step 
From Nature's manifestations to their laws, 
A reading of the lessons set for man 
In his first primer-book, the outspread world. 
Showing how near at hand, and out beyond, 
A supreme Wisdom reigneth. As a scheme 
Of nice adjustment and well-balanced force — 
Conception of a unity of thought 
And steadfast purpose in each busy movement, 
A wise contrivance in life's noisiest whirl — 
Glimmers in faint reflection on his mind, 
It kindles there ambition's daring fires 



06 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And grand suggestions that reach broadly out 
From atoms, movement, laws, to their First Cause: 
That which can comprehend must be of kind 
With that which hath contrived — the thought 

is clear — 
So man, perceiving Nature may be traced 
Through littie spaces by his patient thought, 
Feels his relation to his God more near; 
While the religious instincts of his soul 
Prompt him to foUow knowledge in the paths 
Where Science leads to Nature's altar, Truth. 
Religion, Science — why oppose the words ? 
One is the impulse to reach up, beyond 
Earth's accidents, to Heaven's serenity; 
The other shows the way. Another way 
Faith, with her heavenward eyes, may point to us: 
Each seeks the way to satisfy the soul. 

The sainted zealot kneeling at the shrine, 

Or prostrate cast beneath the crucifix, 

Cries, in an ecstacy of fervent zeal : 

"Salva, O Jesu, me miserrimum!" 

An earnest preacher, warm in his belief, 

Propounds to rapt disciples holy creed; 

Franklin, with kite-string and a Leyden jar, 

His forehead bared to angry elements. 

Questions the flashing messengers of God; 

Or Yoimg — not he who wrote his sad " Night 

Thoughts," 
But the learned doctor of philosophy — 
Follows the waves of light through devious maze 



97 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Up to the Source that planned their wondrous ways. 
Which of these worshipers, thus lifting hands 
Toward his throne, and to his light of truth, 
Pays largest homage unto Deity ? 
Lays on his altar most acceptable gifts ? 
Which best fulfils the purpose of his being ? 
Follows most surely the instinctive guide 
Set, like a compass, in the soul of man ? 
Which comes the nearest to the Heart of Love 
Whose great pulsations fill the universe ? 
How dare we judge or draw dividing line ? 
The impulse, the adoring heart, the same; 
In all the same up-reaching toward God! 

While thus religion, an eternal law. 
Impels mankind as matter is propelled 
By gravitation, or as atoms move 
Subject to laws of their afl&nities. 
Around this native and unchanging force 
We group our symbols in the fond belief 
That thus we picture the great gates of Truth, 
And that our thoughts are its mysterious light 
Filtered through Nature into souls of men. 

"Life is no little thing! O tell me not 

Man is a worm conceived of crumbling dust. 

And fragile as its atoms! Lo, I breathe! 

And the sweet breath that fills my rising breast 

Sends joy, with life, through every quickening pulse; 

Bright fancies crowd in my conceptive brain. 

And fashion thoughts that rise on heaven-born wings 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



So far above the narrow walls that hold 

This organism of dust that I forget 

My habitation is a group of cells, 

A walking figure, an automaton 

Woimd up to nm, perhaps, for four-score years; 

While in my heart beat such ecstatic throbs 

Of sympathy with grand ideals that life 

Is lifted to their levels. Not a worm! 

The thing of dust compounded, and no more, 

Can never rise above its native dust 

Save as the moth may flap its shining wings: 

But I have higher wisdom than the laws 

Of dust could give; and Nature whispers me. 

This human wisdom is the bright crown- jewel 

Of an immortal kingdom, to whose halls 

This shape of earth is but the narrow portal." 

So speaks proud Health. Come to his darkened 

room. 
And hear the invalid on his bed of pain: 
"O weary Hours, how slowl — how slow you move! 
Your feet were quick to dance in days of health. 
But now you linger as enamored of Pain; 
You scarce would stop to toy with bright-eyed 

Pleasure; 
Now will you stay to dally with Disease ? 
What an unworthy thing is weary life! 
How poor a creature, man ! Imprisoned thus, 
A wretched victim in a torture-chamber, 
I feel the cruel rack of pitiless pain 
Distress each nerve and fibre of my body, 
More sensitive to anguish than in health 



99 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



They ever thrilled to the delights of pleasure. 

Ah I once I deemed my soul was set above 

The organism of life in such high place, 

Its calm serenity might be immoved 

Although Disease, with cruel vulture-beak. 

Should make each delicate nerve a shrinking prey. 

Alas, serenity deserts me now; 

And many fears and doubts, that long ago 

Were laid to rest by wise philosophy. 

Come darkly back, their wide-distended shapes 

Casting disturbing shadows on my couch I 

Fancy, that, in my days of better health, 

Built up enchanted palaces of hope. 

Now pictures sombre halls of darkening gloom. 

Or frights me with the grave's deep, narrow walls 1 " 

So groans the sick man on his weary bed 

Till wilder phantoms come to chase away 

Each reasonable thought, surrounding him 

With all the weird, fantastic crew of shapes 

Hot fever brings in her attendant train. 

Frightful and motley in confusion mixed, 

A dance of demons, clown, and harlequin. 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XVIII 
Pfi^rlj^ 5l00k0 l^gnttJi 

Is it a pleasant land to which at last 

We go when this Earth-pilgrimage is o'er, 
A fairer country on that other shore 

Where all our future fortunes shall be cast ? 

So will I trust — so hold reliance fast : 

Death is but change, and we need fear no more 
The unknown world beyond its fatal door; 

For Love and Reason say, that threshold passed, 

"Progressive life will bless humanity: 

If not the wondrous city, we are told 

Hath shining streets adorned and paved with gold. 
Yet a bright land, where loving friends will be; 
And where our souls may grow more clear to see 

The beautiful in God's high ministry." 

The strife is over; multitudinous phases 
Of life concluded; silent lies in death 
The casket of a soul. No power remains 
To stir again the nicely fashioned nerves, 
Flashing intelligence to intellect, 
Or sending forth the ready mind's commands. 
The mechanism of muscle, frame of bone. 
Sinews, ceUs, tissues, brain, veins, arteries. 
Are perfect; but that subtle potency, 
The soul, hath fled the pulseless shape of clay. 
Relieved of tenancy, the empty house — 
Its walls of flesh no longer held upright 
By mystic agency of vital fires — 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Returns again to kindred clay of earth, 
Resolving into primal elements, 
A pile of dust that Nature's artist hand 
May touch anew, and model into forms 
Of nice organic structure, which a breath 
May thrill, life animate, and mind control. 
Again to die, to be by death renewed. 

But whither goes the death-enfranchised soul ? 

None may disclose the secret of its flight. 

Hidden behind tear-sprinkled, awful gates 

Made dread by doubts and fears. Why would we 

know 
Our future dwelling and our future lot ? 
Why seek to draw aside the veil that hides 
The change from life to death ? — an idle wish, 
Whose gratifying might belittle life. 
Often most poor in its most fortunate light; 
But, ah, how shnmken might it seem to us 
In the effulgence of the clearer future! 

Death, thy fimereal curtain, hung between 
Man and his future, hides with sable folds 
A multitude of scenes! The unseen world. 
As Faith or Hope or legends picture it. 
Is set beyond the last momentous change 
This failing organism of life can feel. 
How many dreams of strained conceptive fancy. 
Visions evoked from fevered brain of zeal. 
Are placed beyond the threshold of this life I 
Thrilled by an inspiration. Fervor paints. 
With daring hand, the glorious halls of Heaven 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



And the new life, from death reanimate, 
After the promptings of a fond desire, 
Fancy's bright tints, or ecstasy's dehrium; 
And thinks the picture by a hand divine. 

The din of arms rang through the ancient North; 

And blue-eyed Norsemen cased gigantic limbs 

In panoply of war. Their war-god, Odin, 

Breathed on the blast mysterious messages 

That stirred the hearts of warriors. From his brow 

The fierce berserker swept his uncombed hair, 

That hung its tangled, tawny masses down 

His brawny shoulders and half-naked breast, 

And lifted upward eyes that gleamed in light 

Of frenzied zeal. He saw above him shine 

Walhalla's halls, where, chanting battle-songs, 

Were met the heroes of his ancestry, 

Tall chiefs whose swords had cut the shields of kings ; 

Upon the swan's-bath, with their dragon beaks, 

Defied the Storm-king and his dash of waves. 

Upon vast tables is a mighty feast 

With marvelous boar's flesh and the crooked horns 

Foaming with mead : in noisy revelry 

Are mingled gods and heroes shouting "Skoal I" 

The Northman's heaven of rough and boisterous 

feasting 
Saved him from Niflheim, from the gloomy Hela, 
From famine, misery, and dread abode 
In the deep cave of thick and hungry fogs. 
A savage creed, by cruel legends taught. 
Filled his barbaric heart with stormy joys; 



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Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Drowned Pity's pleading voice in War's alarms; 

Drove the berserker, like a demon, forth. 

The frenzied zealot of the savage North, 

Who wooed grim death — to him a lovely bride — 

As on the spears he rushed, and shouting fell, 

That from wide-gaping wounds, his ghost might spring 

To high Walhalla, and of Odin claim 

A feaster's bench in his great banquet-hall. 

A change of scene. — The clash of noisy cymbals 

And piercing notes of Moorish music rang 

Wildly among the fig-tree groves beneath 

The shining walls of some Judaean town. 

A swarm of dusky Arabs fiercely swept 

On their fleet steeds, a sudden locust-flight 

That stopped to devastate, then on again 

To conquests new. Beneath the holy crescent 

To die was gain; for Allah's chosen prophet 

Pointed to golden seats and sensual joys, 

For true believers, in that blissful heaven 

Holy Mohammed had proclaimed to men. 

The glow of wild fanaticism shone 

In each keen Arab face, his black eyes gleamed; 

He waved his tall lance; urged with sinewy limbs 

His foam-flecked steed; and rode as joyfully 

To death as, marching through dry wastes of desert, 

The thirsty camels come to some cool spring. 

In his death hour he saw the graceful forms 

Of lovely houris whose encircling arms 

Raised him from earth; the ardent joys of sense, 

Wine-cups that sparkled, love-enticing maidens. 



104 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Possessed his latest thoughts. The earth receded 
From his dim sight as Allah's kingdom dawned 
Upon him, and he hailed the joyful mom 
Gladly as guest, invited to a feast. 
Crossing the threshold, sees a well-spread board, 
Bright lights, and all the pleasant garniture 
Promising sense and appetite delight. 

Inspired by faith, the Hindu cast himself 
Before the car of Vishnu, his great god. 
Preserver of the world and of the soul 
That dares to meet him at the gate of death. 
As the freed spirit left his mangled form 
Visioned (Jelights awaited in the sky: 
Delightful groves, bright, crystal streams, and lakes 
With pearl-embedded strands; o'er fragant waves 
Floated sweet lotus blossoms; gay-winged birds 
Sang songs of love, and flitted radiantly — 
Such was the vision in his glazing eyes. 
His dear reward for sacrifice of life. 

The dying Christian turns his thoughts from earth, 

And as, with ebbing pulse, his life goes out, 

Looks to the home his Father and his God 

Hath made for him when Death shall bid him come 

To his inheritance, a mansion built 

By Father-love for his eternal rest. 

While chilly tremblings seize his mortal frame. 

Celestial music fills his dying ears: 

The songs of seraphs call him up from Earth; 

And pure-eyed angels, on their snowy wings, 

A shining host, convey his soul to Heaven. 



los 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XIX 

The low-browed savage bows to earth his head 
Before the rude-carved idol of his race, 
And of the frightful monster begs a place 

In his immortal kingdom of the dead. 

Of this same kingdom, often contemplated, 
The wisdom of the world hath sought to trace 
The bounds, and every doubt and fear efface; 

Describe its glory — all earth-glories fled — 
Show the clear splendor of its heavenly day, 

The joyousness of immortality. 

Lo ! here broad-visaged, wise Philosophy 
Meets the brute savage in death's narrow way; 

And in like knowledge of that unknown land. 

Learning and Ignorance go hand in hand. 

A sceptic cries: "There is no more beyond 

The present life, nothing to hope, to fear; 

Death is an end of thinkings, pleasures, pains; 

Who would ask more would be dissatisfied 

At last with an eternity of life. 

Why drag the thing beyond its natural length 

With fanciful translation to the skies ? 

Would you, like Alexander, be a god. 

Who fill too poorly the small place of man ? 

Have aU the ages taught mankind in vain 

By their examples miStiplied beyond 

Our computation, by analogies 

Plainly expressed through eons of constant death - 



io6 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



While Science vainly seeks man's future life — 

That posthumous existence is hope's folly ? 

Man's weak attempt to glorify himself ? — 

Poor child of vanity! — an idle fancy?" 

Then brings he skillful arts of sophistry 

To show that man is nothing, matter nothing, 

Soul a vain fancy and incapable 

Of any proof of its own entity. 

All things sensations unreliable, 

And man's environment th' unknowable. 

Then soul is but a myth; and what is man? 

Ephemeral compound of the elements; 

A happy union of material laws; 

A fungus springing from the clods of earth; 

No higher birth; no greater destiny: 

And his immortal hopes, his large desires. 

His yearning after God's eternal light 

Of truth — these, then, are vain delusions all. 

But yet this accident — this happy chance — 

Phantasm of sensitive nonentity — 

Thing of a base, material ancestry — 

Mere aggregate of atoms — dares to claim 

Beyond the potency of concrete matter; 

Sets up a court of inquiry and sends out. 

To parent laws, an absolute subpoena; 

Tests them with questions and nice measurement 

Until it learns the limitation of that 

Hath built its structure and environment; 

Weighs law with law, and traces movement back 

Beyond the active agency of laws; 



107 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Winning at last, the prize of toiling thought, 

A faint conception of some lesser parts 

Of the great scheme of matter, force and life. 

Of which its parent laws are but blind servants. 

Can a created thing so far surpass 

Its limited creators, and enjoy 

A reach beyond the makers of its life ? 

Whence can it have enlargement of their powers ? 

Can laws create a thing to question laws ? 

Out of a brazen jar a genie rise. 

As in the fable of th' Arabian tale ? 

So strange a thought mocks our credulity, 

Less easy of belief than Zeal's great schemes, 

The bright, elaborate picturings of Faith, 

The grandest altar-piece her hand hath wrought, 

The warmest coloring by Fancy laid. 

The richest imagery of impassioned thought. 

Testing the convolutions of gray matter, 
Science declares that thought is but a fimction 
Of brain; yet fails to find the potent cause 
Of cerebration. Brain is the machine 
Through which the soul expresses every thought, 
As, through his violin, the skilled musician 
Pours forth a flood of perfect melody. 
There is no music in the sounding wood. 
No thought in convolutions of the brain. 
Without the moving power, the master-spirit. 
The brain may die, the violin be crushed, 
But thought and melody will still survive. 
The brain is no more primal cause of thought 



io8 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Than muscle, strength: each is a means, not cause — 
Gray matter of the brain 1 Alas, if man 
Must be content to deem his bosom's lord 
Fimction of brain alone, and not a spirit 
Divine, though dwelling in a house of flesh! 

The lily rises from the lap of Earth 

To burst in golden sunshine swollen buds. 

And blooming yield to her bright bridegroom, day, 

In soft profusion her fair virgin beauty: — 

Beauty of purity in her white blossom 

And a perfection of the lines of shape 

Are blended in the flower's loveliness. 

Whence is the lily's beauty ? The calm ox, 

Cropping the young and tender blades of grass, 

Lifts not his stupid head and great, slow eyes 

To gaze enamored of the lovely bloom; 

He nothing knows of beauty; thinks indeed 

The sweet, short grasses are more admirable 

Than aU the bloom of lilies. Whence is this ? 

Here are the lines of grace, the exquisite bloom; 

And here the nice machinery of the eye 

To see perfection in the lovely flower; 

Yet in the ox is no effect of beauty; 

Nor hath he ever known an intimation 

Of that most subtile of the brain's perceptions — 

That wonderful and precious mystery — • 

That moves man's bosom, and excites his soul, 

When he beholds the lily's loveliness. 

The mystery of beauty is a light 

That flashes on his soul at the appeal 



109 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Of nature's picturings, as if he caught 
An inspiration of the master-thought 
Of which all nature is the imagery. 
A consciousness of purity and grace 
Of perfect form may live within the bloom 
Of the fair lily; — who may dare to tell 
The limitation of the lovely flower. 
Or arrogate to man alone the message 
It whispers of divinest harmonies ? — 
But to the soul of man the IDy speaks 
A more important message, different thoughts 
Of beauty than those dreams of bud and bloom 
That fill the blossom's simpler consciousness. 
Man's recognition is of higher thought 
Than grace or shape: he sees the curtain rise 
A little from the psychic mystery 
Of his own being and its close relation 
To largest wisdom and eternal purpose 
In Nature's universal harmonies. 
So from the humbler lily comes the thought 
Which lifts his soul to mental arrogance, 
That he can read the legend of the flower; 
Can feel its subtile pulsing symphonies 
Bearing swift messages between himself 
And life's supreme, divine Intelligence. 
How can he, then, account himself a cipher — 
He and the flowers to live brief lives and per- 
ish — 
For all his intuitions surely cry 
That harmony, at least, must be immortal ? 
It were a desecration of himself, 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



At which his intellect would make its protest 
In every exercise of conscious thought. 

Away, vain doubts, that clashing creeds suggest! 
And if I may not climb on Jacob's ladder. 
Where every step is a disputed dogma. 
Yet am I not content to sleep in dust 
Forever, only a forgotten shape 
Of Earth that chance hath built of restless atoms. 
Here in close confines of small space and time. 
Mocked by the bickering forms of constant change, 
And haimted by grim doubts of the desire 
That fills my bosom, lest it be a strain 
Of siren melody, and not the voice 
Of Truth; yet is this life the worthier, nobler. 
That it must battle with vague mysteries. 
And bravely win its crowning victories 
By patient toil and wise intelligence. 
Entangled in the labyrinth of Change, 
While Time's quick -tumult whirls and hurries on. 
We yet may work life's problem so far out, 
To recognize the movement everywhere. 
Eternal progress through the universe, 
The constant march of life- thrilled atomies, 
Unnumbered forms endued with vital force 
That drives them ever onward — on to death ? 
But death stays not the restless rush of life; 
Death is but change of form while life survives — 
Life! always life! When life casts off one dress, 
It puts another on : the spirit of life 
Is universal — is it not immortal ? 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



No atom of the Earth is lost in death; 
How can I then be lost ? Are human souls 
So valueless that Nature casts them out 
From the vast kingdom of immortal things, 
And falsifying all her promises, 
Plimges them only into nothingness? 
So we were less than all the world of matter, 
The only food for death, while meaner things - 
Things that have been subservient to our uses 
Go on immortal in imending progress. 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



XX 

If, with Pythagoras, my mind would trace 

How souls, through many bodies, have been fleeing. 
So tracking life along the scale of being; 

Or if I deem the progress of my race 

Hath upward grown from beings low and base, 
Still do I find the Psyche fret for freeing, 
Although sublime, immortal life foreseeing; 

Pining for freedom; seeking higher place. 
Why should she flutter in a vata desire 

To break her bars ? Why foster so much pride ? 
Why scorch her fragile wings with passion's fixe ? 

Why beg Philosophy her flight to guide ? 

A few quick-speeding years beneath the stars, 
And Death will break her earthly prison-bars. 

The careful study of progressive years 

Builds science largely up from garnered facts; 

But finds no way to bridge the yawning chasm 

Stretching between two worlds which it would join. 

Where Science fails Imagination flies 

On airy wings above the dim abyss, 

And summons spirits with a mystic call — 

pirits, that Science, searching the vast, the small, 
The high, the low, throughout her wide domains. 
Had failed to reach with all her careful art — 
These are not spirits of an unseen world. 
But angel-dwellers in each human soul. 
Guiding its highest, truest intuitions — 



113 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Spirits that build a rainbow bridge beyond 

Where f aUing Science stands perplexed and dumb : 

From thought to thought quick inspiration leaps, 

Learning the wondrous truth that largest wisdom 

Rests not on toil-built piers of masonry; 

But, greatly daring, finds, in dizzy flights. 

Its surest way and grandest, broadest range. 

So, if we dare, we take the crown from Science, 

And set it on the radiant, dazzling head 

Of bold Imagination, in the hope 

This tricksy spirit prove a faithful guide — 

Imagination carefidly directed 

By intuitions of the human soul 

May be a safer guide — if, as we trust. 

Divinely sent from Heaven — than halting Science 

That sees no path beyond the gates of Death. 

What marvels of new change may come to us. 

To all the world of atoms, when we leave 

The old accustomed paths of life to venture, 

Under new guidance, into unknown realms! — 

New changes for the atom! — ever change! 

For all the movement of imnumbered eons 

Hath failed to fill the measure over-full; 

And it may be that every change is progress 

Of men, of atoms, of the universe; 

While evolution, in its constant cycles, 

Forces new truths from ancient mysteries. 

The larger thought conceives a constant purpose 

In Time's long march of countless centuries. 

And, though it may not grasp the perfect plan. 

Hath faith to take assurance that the grandeur 



114 



Whisperings of the Sphinx 



Of all the Past is no vain pageantry, 

No masque of shadows meaningless, or false. 

What last condition waits to crown the atom 

Is past our knowledge; but so grand a march 

Must be to some great end; nor can we think 

Matter and force will ever separate; 

But swing forever in imending cycles 

Throughout the long eternity of time. 

And man, sometime the master of the atom, 

Hath comprehensive thought so far beyond 

His little place of earthly circumstance 

That every germ of truth he gathers here 

Is full of promise, and unless it wither 

Into a falsehood, breaking each relation 

It bears to him and all, must still abide 

With him, and grow to bloom and perfect fruitage 

Beyond this ripple of the sea of Change 

In clearer light and purer airs of Heaven. 

Change is the movement of the Master's hand, 

And constant purpose is divinely whispered 

Beneath its touch: so are we ever drawn. 

By what is best in us, to what is best 

And wisest over all. If all too slow 

We seem to come to good, the scheme extends 

So far beyond our narrow symbol. Time, 

That in eternity the fast and slow 

Are merged and one; and Change at length may be 

No longer cruel, but beneficent, 

Making our journey through imending years 

Full of delight and constant happiness. 



IIS 



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